Multi-venue
City festivals
Events like Manchester Psych Fest spread bands across several venues in one city. Log it as a single festival with its location and the acts you saw, rather than a pile of separate gigs.
Festival tracker app
The festival tracker app for every weekend you've survived
StubStash is a festival tracker app that keeps a proper record of every festival you've been to: the year, the site, who headlined each day, the bands you discovered by accident on a side stage, what the ticket cost and what you'll want to remember in ten years.
From city all-dayers to muddy camping weekends, your festival history ends up in one place instead of scattered across wristbands and a camera roll.
The problem
Why festivals are the hardest gigs to remember
A normal gig is easy to pin down. One night, one venue, a headliner and a support act or two. A festival is a different beast. You might see fifteen or twenty bands over a weekend, across three or four stages, and by the Monday it has all blurred into one long, loud day.
Too many bands, too many stages
The headliners stick, mostly. It's the undercard that disappears: the band you wandered into while queuing for food, the opener on the second stage who turned out to be your highlight of the weekend. Ask yourself who you saw on the Saturday afternoon of a festival five years ago and you'll probably draw a blank.
Days run together
Was it Friday or Saturday that the sound cut out? Which year did it rain all weekend? Festivals repeat, often at the same site with a familiar feel, so different years merge in your memory in a way that single gigs rarely do.
Your phone gives up first
The one device that could have kept a record is usually on 4% by Saturday night, and the photos it did manage are a jumble of blurry stage shots with no clue which band was playing. Ticket confirmations sit in an old inbox, and the wristband ends up in a drawer or the bin. A dedicated festival log fixes that, as long as it's quick to fill in.
It's worth the effort. Festivals are usually the biggest live music outings of the year: the most bands, the most money and the most stories. Being able to look up which year you first went to a festival, or the weekend you saw a band before anyone had heard of them, is half the fun of keeping a festival history at all.
What to record
What to write down for every festival
You don't need to log every minute. A good festival diary captures the details that are hardest to recover later:
- Festival name and year. Recurring festivals need the year, or every edition blurs together.
- Location. The site or city, especially if the festival has moved or uses several venues.
- Each day's headliners. Who closed the night on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
- Undercard bands you discovered. The smaller names you caught by chance are the ones you'll forget fastest and want back most.
- Ticket price. Handy for comparing years and seeing how much festival tickets have crept up.
- Memories. A few words on the weather, who you went with, and the set you'll still talk about.
Get those down and you've got a festival history worth looking back on.
How it works
How the StubStash festival tracker app works
StubStash gives festivals their own archive, separate from your one-off gigs. Every festival is grouped by year, so you can scroll back through your summers in order.
Day-by-day lineup tags
Each festival carries lineup tags for the days you were there, along the lines of "SAT: Wytch Hazel" and "SUN: Hällas". At a glance you can see who you watched and on which day, which is exactly the detail that goes missing first.
Location on every entry
The location sits with each festival, so Bloodstock Open Air at Catton Park, Swadlincote, reads differently from an all-dayer at Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield.
Headliners, undercards, prices and memories
Log each day's headliners and the undercard acts you caught, record what you paid, and keep your festival memories with the entry rather than buried in your camera roll.
Every kind of festival
From city all-dayers to camping weekends
Smaller events
All-dayers
Smaller events such as Cosmic Vibration at Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield pack a lot of bands into a short space of time. They're easy to forget and quick to log.
Under canvas
Camping weekends
Multi-day festivals like Bloodstock Open Air at Catton Park get a headliner and undercard for each day you were on site, plus the ticket price and your memories of the weekend.
Festival logging checklist
A simple festival logging checklist
- 01
Before you go
Add the festival with its name, year and location, and record the ticket price while the confirmation email is still easy to find.
- 02
Each evening
Before your phone dies, jot down that day's headliner and any band that surprised you. Thirty seconds is enough.
- 03
On the way home
Fill in the gaps for each day: undercard acts, the set of the weekend, who you went with, what the weather did.
- 04
Once you're back
Go through the camera roll while you still know which band is which, and write up your festival memories before the details fade.
The bigger picture
Festival discoveries feed your artist directory
Festivals are where a lot of us find new favourite bands. That opener you caught on a Sunday lunchtime could be the band you go on to see five more times. In StubStash, bands you log at a festival also appear in your artist directory, the A–Z index of every band you've seen live, showing when, where and how many times.
So the trail is all there: the festival where you first saw them, then every headline show after it. If you also want to keep track of your regular nights out, the gig diary page covers logging one-off shows, and our guide on how to remember every concert has tips for piecing together old festivals from ticket emails, bank statements and photo dates.
A music festival app that sits alongside your gigs
Festivals live in their own archive, but they're part of the same live music history as your concerts and Battle of the Bands nights. With the optional StubStash Pro upgrade you also get concert analytics like average ticket price and top-seen artists, plus On This Day throwbacks showing what you were watching on this date in previous years.
StubStash is free on Google Play for Android. See everything else it does on the StubStash homepage.
FAQ
Questions
What is the best way to track festivals I've been to?
Give each festival its own entry with the year, location, each day's headliners, the undercard bands you caught and what you paid. StubStash has a dedicated festivals archive for exactly this, grouped by year with day-by-day lineup tags.
Can StubStash log multi-day festivals?
Yes. StubStash lets you track multi-day festivals with daily headliners, undercards, ticket prices and festival memories, so a Friday-to-Sunday weekend sits in one entry with each day's lineup tagged.
Does it work for city festivals spread across several venues?
Yes. A multi-venue city festival such as Manchester Psych Fest is logged as one festival with its location and the bands you saw each day, just like a camping weekend at a single site.
Do bands I discover at a festival show up in my artist directory?
Yes. StubStash's artist directory is an A–Z index of every band you've seen live, showing when, where and how many times, so a band you stumbled on at a festival sits alongside the bands you've seen at headline shows.
Is the StubStash festival tracker free?
StubStash is free to download on Google Play and contains ads. There is an optional in-app upgrade, StubStash Pro, which adds personal concert analytics, an On This Day nostalgia feed and removes ads.
Is StubStash available on iPhone?
StubStash is an Android app, available on Google Play.
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