You've mentally noted twelve artists you want to see live. Maybe twenty. But when they announce tours, you find out three weeks later. After presale. After face-value tickets are gone. Sometimes after the show already happened.
The problem isn't that you don't care. It's that you have no system to turn "I should see them" into "I bought tickets."
A concert wishlist fixes that. But only if it's built right. And once you actually get to those shows, you'll want a way to document them before the details fade.
Give Yourself One Quick Win Right Now
Before you read another word, write down five artist names. Anywhere. Notes app, napkin, back of a receipt. Just five artists you'd genuinely regret not seeing live.
That's your wishlist. Everything else is just making it work better.
Why Mental Lists Fail You
The average music fan has 15 to 30 artists they'd go see if those artists came to town. Most of those names are tracked nowhere except inside their head.
Here's what happens. Tours get announced on random Tuesday mornings. You're not checking 20 different artist pages for tour dates. You're working, sleeping, living your life. Presales happen while you're in a meeting. By the time you hear about the show from a friend or see it on Instagram, tickets are $200 on resale. Or the show already happened.
The gap isn't motivation. You already want to see these artists. The gap is information at the right time.
You're scrolling Instagram. You see a tour announcement. You feel a flash of FOMO. Then you scroll past. By the time you think about it again, presale is over. A week later, you see photos from the show and remember you meant to buy tickets.
This happens because wanting to see a band and knowing they're coming to your city are two completely separate things in your brain. A wishlist connects them.
What Makes a Wishlist Actually Work
A concert wishlist isn't just artist names in a list. It needs structure, or you'll build it once and never look at it again.
Tier Your Priorities
Not every artist on your list deserves the same urgency. Some artists you'd drop everything for. Others you'd see if the timing worked out and tickets weren't expensive. Treat them differently.
Tier 1 is drop everything. You buy tickets the day they're announced. You'd drive two hours. You'd pay premium prices if you had to. These are your must-sees. The artists you've been saying you need to see for years. The ones where missing them would genuinely bother you.
Tier 2 is strong interest. If they play locally, timing works, and prices are reasonable, you're in. You're interested but not desperate. You'd go but you're not rearranging your life for it.
Tier 3 is curious. If a friend suggests it, tickets are cheap, or it's part of a festival lineup, sure. They're on your radar but not a priority. You'd enjoy the show but you're not seeking it out.
Most people have three to five tier-one artists, ten to fifteen tier-two artists, and however many tier-three artists they feel like tracking. Your numbers will be different. That's fine.
Add Context for Fast Decisions
When presale opens and you have two hours to decide, you need more than just a name.
You're staring at Ticketmaster at 10am on a Friday. Presale code ready. Tickets are $85. The show is on a Tuesday. Do you buy them?
If your wishlist just says "Phoebe Bridgers," you're guessing. If it says "Phoebe Bridgers (been saying I'd see her for 3 years, only if under $100, would drive to nearby cities)," you know the answer immediately.
For each artist, note why they're on your list, what your limits are, and how much urgency you feel. It takes 30 seconds when you add them. It saves you from bad decisions and missed opportunities later.
Make It Active, Not Passive
Here's where most wishlists die. You build them. You feel organized. Then you never look at them again.
A passive list just sits there. You still have to remember to check it. You still have to hunt down tour announcements. You still have to know when presale codes drop. That's not a system. That's just a better-organized mental list.
An active wishlist does something. It tells you when tours get announced. It reminds you when tickets go on sale. It connects the information to the action.
If your wishlist doesn't actively alert you, it's decoration.
Where People Try to Keep This (And Why It Doesn't Work)
Notes App
You write "bands to see" at midnight after an incredible show. You add three names. Six months later, you can't find the note. Or you have five different notes scattered across apps. One is called "concerts," one is "shows to see," one is "music," and you can't remember which one has which artists.
This fails because it's scattered. No alerts. No reminders. You never look at it unless you're specifically trying to find that one artist name you wrote down four months ago.
Spotify Following
Following 200 artists on Spotify isn't a concert wishlist. You get buried in notifications about new single releases, not tour dates. And Spotify's tour alerts are unreliable. Sometimes you get them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you get them two weeks after tickets went on sale.
Wrong tool. Spotify is built for music discovery, not concert tracking.
Spreadsheet
Some people go full spreadsheet. Artist name, genre, priority ranking, last tour dates, price limits, venue preferences. It's comprehensive. It's organized. It works until life gets busy and you stop updating it.
Three months pass. You haven't opened the spreadsheet. Meanwhile, two artists from your list announced tours, sold out, and played shows in your city. The spreadsheet just sat there.
This fails because it requires active maintenance but provides no active value. Tours happen while the spreadsheet collects digital dust.
Bandsintown or Songkick
These tools are better. They actually track tours and send alerts. You follow artists, set your location, get notifications when they announce shows near you.
But they don't integrate with anything else. Your wishlist lives in one app. Your concert memory lives somewhere else. Future shows and past shows are completely separate systems. When you finally see that tier-one artist, you have to log it somewhere else entirely.
This works better than a notes app or a spreadsheet, but it's still fragmented.
The pattern across all of these approaches: passive lists don't translate to action. You need something that actively tells you when it matters, with enough time to actually do something about it.
How to Build Your Wishlist: Start Simple
Don't overthink this. Start with five artists.
Right now, name five artists you'd genuinely regret not seeing live. Artists where if they announced a show tomorrow, you'd immediately start figuring out how to make it work.
Write them down somewhere. Anywhere. Just start. You can expand later, but five names is enough to be useful.
Three Ways to Build From There
Once you have your five, you can build the rest of your wishlist three different ways. Most people use all three at different times.
The retrospective scan is looking backward. Who have you said "I need to see them live" about for three years? Which openers from past concerts stuck with you? What artists keep coming up in conversations with friends who go to shows?
Pull from your Spotify year-end stats. Look at festival lineups you studied but didn't attend. Check your Instagram saves for tour announcements you flagged but forgot about. Scan your music library for artists you love but have never caught live. If you need help reconstructing what you've already seen, our guide on how to find your concert history can help.
Do this once to seed your list, then move on.
The forward add is building the habit. Add artists the moment you think "I should see them live."
Heard a killer opener? Add them before you leave the venue. Friend won't stop talking about a band? Add them. Album you've been repeating for two weeks? Add them. Saw a tour announcement and felt FOMO? Add them right then. This is the same principle behind building your concert archive—capture it in the moment or lose it.
The key is adding them in the moment, before you forget. This becomes your default way of maintaining the list.
The genre sweep is filling gaps. Pick a category and deliberately populate it.
"90s artists I never saw live and might not get another chance." Radiohead, Bjork, Portishead, whoever you missed. "Current indie artists I'm sleeping on." Scan recent festival lineups and add names that keep appearing. "Legacy acts before they retire." The artists who won't be touring much longer.
Do this occasionally when you realize you're missing an entire category of artists you care about.
Start with retrospective. Build the habit of forward adding. Use genre sweeps to catch what you're missing.
What Belongs on Your Wishlist (And What Doesn't)
Definitely Add
Artists you've never seen but want to. Artists you saw once and would absolutely see again. Openers who stole the show at a concert you attended. Bucket-list legacy acts before they stop touring. Artists your friends rave about and you trust their taste. Artists you're curious about. Tier three exists specifically for this.
Skip These
Artists you've seen five times and feel complete about. If you loved them, saw them multiple times, and don't feel any pull to see them again, they don't belong here. Artists you liked one song from but don't actually want to see live. We've all added an artist based on one track and then realized we don't know any of their other music. Delete them. Artists you added because you felt you "should." If you're adding someone because they're critically acclaimed or everyone else loves them, but you personally don't care, skip it.
Your wishlist should reflect what you actually want to experience. Not what looks impressive. Not what's comprehensive.
There's no right number of artists to have on a wishlist. Some people have eight. Some have fifty. The goal isn't complete coverage of every artist you've ever heard of. The goal is capturing the shows that would genuinely matter to you if you caught them.
Quality over quantity. A tight list of fifteen artists you truly care about beats a padded list of sixty names you ignore.
Making Your Wishlist Active (Not Just a Better-Organized List)
Here's where most wishlists die. You make them. You feel organized for about three days. Then you never look at them again. Tours happen. Presales come and go. Shows sell out. Your wishlist just sits there, perfectly organized and completely useless.
The difference between a wishlist that works and a wishlist that collects dust is whether it actively does something.
The Manual Approach (If You're Not Using an App)
If you're keeping your wishlist in a notes app or spreadsheet, you have to build the alert system yourself.
Set alerts everywhere. Follow your tier-one artists on Spotify, but don't rely on it. Join their email lists. Yes, even the spammy ones that send you messages about new merch and reissued vinyl. For your must-see artists, the spam is worth it. Follow tour announcement accounts on social media. Set quarterly calendar reminders to manually check tour schedules for your top ten artists.
Check your wishlist before buying tickets to anything. Someone invites you to a show. Before you commit and buy tickets, open your wishlist. Is there a tier-one artist playing that same month? Would you rather see them instead?
This prevents the scenario where you spend $150 on tickets to something you're lukewarm about, and then two days later your favorite band announces a tour and you can't afford both.
Review your list every three months. Set a recurring calendar event. Four times a year, go through your wishlist and update it. Who did you finally see? Remove them or move them down a tier. Who feels more important now? Move them up. Who are you completely over? Delete them.
Lists decay. Keep yours current or it stops reflecting what you actually care about.
This approach works, but it's exhausting. You're doing all the work. You're the alert system. You're the one who has to remember to check. And you will forget. Everyone forgets.
The App Approach (Closes the Loop)
This is where the Concerts Remembered app changes how this works.
The wishlist feature does the work you'd otherwise be doing manually. You add artists to your wishlist. Set your location and how far you'd realistically travel for a show. Turn on notifications. When those artists announce shows in your range, you get alerted. When tickets go on sale, including presales, you get alerted again. All your upcoming wishlist shows appear in one feed.
The difference isn't just convenience. It's that your wishlist isn't separate from the rest of your concert life.
The flow becomes: Artists you want to see. Get notified when they tour. Buy tickets. Watch the countdown. Go to the show. Document the show in the same app where you were tracking it.
You're not maintaining two systems. One for future concerts you hope to catch. Another for past concerts you want to remember. It's all connected. Your wishlist is the front half of your concert memory. For a full breakdown of what the app can do, see our complete guide to the Concerts Remembered app.
The app is still rolling out features, but the core functionality (wishlist plus location-based alerts) is the foundation. You can start using it now to track who you want to see, and the app will tell you when it actually matters.
Download the Concerts Remembered app and track your favorite artists and add your first five artists. When they announce shows near you, you'll know immediately. Not three weeks too late.
Real Scenarios Where This Actually Matters
The Opener Who Blew You Away
You go see a headliner. The opener is incredible. You've never heard of them before tonight, but they just became one of your favorite discoveries of the year.
Set changeover happens. You pull out your phone. Add them to your wishlist as tier two. Put your phone away. Go back to enjoying the headliner.
Four months later, that opener announces their own headline tour. You get an alert the morning it's announced. You buy tickets during presale. You don't miss them.
Without a wishlist, here's what happens instead. You think "I should remember their name." You don't write it down. Two weeks later, you can't remember what they were called. You never think about them again. They tour. You miss it entirely. (Sound familiar? There's a reason we forget concerts we attended—and it applies to artists we meant to see, too.)
The Three-Year "Someday"
You've been saying "I should see Mitski" for three years. You love her albums. You've watched live videos on YouTube. You just never actually bought tickets.
You finally add her to your wishlist. Tier one. Note: "Been saying I'd see her for 3 years, need to actually do it this time."
Six weeks later, she announces a tour. You get notified the morning of the announcement, before tickets even go on sale. You're ready when presale starts. You buy tickets. The three-year "someday" becomes an actual date on your calendar.
The difference between this scenario and the previous three years of missing her? You built the bridge between wanting to see her and knowing she was coming.
The Near-Miss You Prevented
An artist you love announces a tour. You see it on social media. You think "I should buy tickets later this week when I have time to figure out my schedule."
You get busy. You forget. Three days pass. A friend texts: "Are you going to the show on Friday?" You check. Sold out. Resale tickets are $180. You missed it because "later this week" became "too late."
This doesn't happen if that artist is on your wishlist with alerts turned on. The announcement notification reminds you the moment it matters. The ticket sale alert gives you a second reminder. You don't have to remember. The system remembers for you.
The common thread in all three scenarios: information at the right time. That's what a functioning wishlist does. It tells you when action is possible, with enough notice to actually take it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many artists should I have on my concert wishlist?
As many as genuinely reflect who you want to see. Some people have ten. Others have fifty. The number doesn't matter. What matters is that you actually use the list and would realistically go if those artists came to town. A wishlist with sixty names you don't care about is worse than a wishlist with eight names you'd all buy tickets for tomorrow.
What's the difference between a concert wishlist and a concert bucket list?
A wishlist tracks specific artists you want to see. Future shows. A bucket list tracks experiences you want to have at concerts. Things like "see a show alone," "cry during a performance," "catch an artist before they blow up," "go to a concert in another country." You can have both. They serve different purposes. The wishlist gets you to shows. The bucket list helps you notice what makes those shows memorable.
Should I add artists I've already seen to my wishlist?
Yes, if you'd see them again. Your favorite band that you've seen four times and would absolutely see a fifth time? Put them on your wishlist. But if you saw an artist once, felt satisfied with that experience, and don't feel any pull to see them again, leave them off. The wishlist is for artists you're actively trying to catch, not a complete list of everyone you like.
How often should I update my concert wishlist?
Add artists immediately when you discover them or realize you want to see them. That's the easy part. For reviewing the full list, every three to four months works for most people. Go through it. Remove artists you've seen and don't need to see again. Remove artists you've lost interest in. Re-tier based on changing priorities. An artist who was tier two last year might be tier one now. Update it.
What if an artist on my wishlist never comes to my area?
Keep them on the list anyway, but add a note about travel flexibility. Some artists are worth a road trip or a flight. Others aren't. Mark which is which so when a tour does happen, you know immediately whether it's realistic for you. If an artist only tours the West Coast and you live in Ohio, that context matters. You might keep them at tier three (curious, would see if I happen to be traveling) instead of tier one (drop everything).
Can I use the Concerts Remembered app just for the wishlist feature without journaling past concerts?
Yes. Some people use it purely to track future shows and get alerts. Others use it for both wishlisting and journaling. The features work independently. You don't have to journal every concert you attend to get value from the wishlist. But they're designed to flow together. Wishlist becomes attendance becomes documented memory. It's one connected system, not separate tools forced into the same app.
Do wishlist alerts work for festivals?
Depends on the tool you're using. The Concerts Remembered app alerts you when artists on your wishlist tour, which includes festival appearances if they're part of announced lineups. But if you're trying to catch an artist only at festivals (maybe because festival tickets are cheaper than headline shows), you might need to supplement with dedicated festival lineup tracking. Most wishlist tools are optimized for regular tours, not festival-specific appearances.
What's the difference between following an artist on Spotify and adding them to my concert wishlist?
Following an artist on Spotify means you want to hear their new music. You get notifications about singles, albums, playlists they're featured on. Adding an artist to a concert wishlist means you're actively trying to catch them live. Those are different goals. Spotify doesn't reliably notify you about tours. And when it does, the notifications are buried alongside release announcements and algorithmic playlists. A dedicated wishlist tool, especially one with location-based alerts, is built specifically to tell you about shows near you when tickets are actually available.
Start Your Wishlist Today
You don't need a perfect system today. You need five artist names and a place to put them.
If you want those five names to actually turn into concert tickets instead of staying hypothetical forever, download the Concerts Remembered app and add them to your wishlist. Set your location. Turn on notifications. When they announce tours near you, you'll know immediately. Not three weeks too late.
Start with five. Build from there. Catch more shows.
The gap between wanting to see artists live and actually seeing them isn't desire. It's a system. Build the system. Close the gap.
And when you finally catch that artist you've been chasing for years? You'll want to remember it. That's where concert journaling comes in.
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