Let me say something nice about Bandsintown before I say anything else: it works. If you have used it for more than a year, it has probably put you in a room you would have otherwise missed. That is the whole job of a discovery app, and Bandsintown does it better than almost anything.
But somewhere in your account, under all those alerts and follows, there is a trail. Every time you tapped "going" or "interested," Bandsintown quietly wrote down a little piece of your concert life. Not on purpose. Not as an archive. Just as a side effect of doing its actual job.
This article is about that trail: how to find your Bandsintown history, what it can and cannot tell you, and how to move it somewhere built to hold it.
The Tracker Half of Bandsintown
Bandsintown's job is telling you who is coming to town. You follow artists, it watches tour announcements, and it pings you when someone you care about books a date within driving distance. It is very good at this, which is why it has been the default tour-alert app for a lot of people for over a decade.
The tracking part was never the point. But RSVP data accumulates whether you mean it to or not. Tap "going" a few times a year for eight years and you have built a rough, accidental map of your concert life. Rough because it captures interest, not attendance. Accidental because nobody taps "interested" thinking they are journaling.
Still, it is a starting point, and for a lot of people it is the only written record of certain years that exists anywhere. If you have ever tried to reconstruct your concert history from scratch, you know how valuable even a rough map is. So before you dismiss it as clutter, go look at it.
Finding Your Attendance Trail
Where your past events live depends on which version of the app or site you are looking at, and Bandsintown redesigns often enough that I am not going to promise exact menu names. But the general path has been stable for years: go to your profile, and look for something labeled past events, RSVPs, or your show history. On the website, your public profile page typically lists the events you responded to, split between upcoming and past.
What is retrievable: the artist, the venue, the date, the city, and which button you tapped ("going" or "interested"). For most people that stretches back years, sometimes to the early 2010s. That is genuinely useful raw material.
What was never captured: whether you actually went. Bandsintown has no idea. It logged your intention on the day the show was announced and never followed up, because following up was never its job. There is no "did you make it?" prompt, no attendance confirmation, nothing distinguishing the night that changed your year from the ticket you ate because of a work emergency.
Keep that limitation in mind, because it shapes everything that follows.
RSVP Is Not a Record
Here is my position, stated plainly: an RSVP list is a list of intentions. Your concert history is a list of what actually happened. Those are different documents, and confusing them will quietly corrupt your archive.
Run the numbers on your own account. Say you marked "going" on 60 shows over the years. If you are like most people, you actually attended maybe 35 of them. Tickets fell through. Friends bailed. Openers you RSVP'd to on a whim got skipped. The list cannot tell you which 35, because from Bandsintown's side of the glass, all 60 look identical.
And it gets worse the further back you go. There is a specific kind of dread in scrolling to an RSVP from 2018 for a band you now genuinely cannot remember whether you saw. You stare at the entry. You were interested, clearly. Did you go? The list shrugs.
So treat your Bandsintown history for what it is: a lead sheet. A prompt list. Sixty leads, some hot, some cold, some dead. It has intentions in it, not memories. That does not make it worthless. It makes it the first step of a two-step job. The second step is turning the leads you can confirm into an actual record, which is where a memory tool comes in.
Path One: The Clean-List Paste
For the shows you know you attended, the fast route is a straight paste. The Concerts Remembered app has a web import tool that accepts freeform text, so there is no direct Bandsintown connection to set up and no export file format to fight with. You copy, it parses.
The process:
- Pull up your Bandsintown past events on the website, where selecting text is easiest.
- Copy the list. Do not bother cleaning it up. Grab the whole messy block, dates and venue names and all.
- Paste it into the import tool, which you can reach from the Concerts Remembered app page. It reads the text and parses it into draft shows with the artist, venue, date, and location filled in.
- Review the drafts. This is where you apply the knowledge Bandsintown never had. That show you skipped in 2021? Delete the draft. The rest, confirm.
- Confirm, and the setlists attach automatically from setlist.fm data. You can mark the songs that mattered while the memory is in front of you.
The review step is the whole point. A blind sync would import all 60 intentions as if they were 60 attendances, and now your archive is 40 percent fiction. A paste-and-review keeps you in the loop for the one judgment call only you can make: was I there?
Time cost for a typical multi-year RSVP list: minutes, not evenings. The parsing does the tedious part. You just do the remembering.
Path Two: "Help Me Find It" for the Fuzzy Ones
Now for the shows that are not on any list. Because if your Bandsintown history is like mine, the RSVPs are the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of nights never got an RSVP at all: shows a friend dragged you to, festival sets, the years before you installed the app. All you have is a fragment. "I know I saw them at some point in 2019. Chicago, maybe?"
This is the normal state of RSVP archaeology, and it is exactly what the Help Me Find It flow in the Concerts Remembered app is built for.
Here is how it works. You start adding a show and type the band name. Instead of guessing at a date, you tap "Help me find it," then narrow it down with whatever fragments you have: a city, a year, or both. The app pulls up the artist's actual show history from setlist.fm data, and suddenly you are looking at the real tour dates, real venues, real cities, laid out in front of you.
Then the thing happens that makes this feature worth the article: you recognize your night. Usually it is the venue name that does it, before you even read the date. You are scanning the list and there it is, the Metro, or the 9:30 Club, or that weird converted church, and the whole evening comes back at once. One tap imports it into your history, setlist included.
The "I saw them in 2019, maybe Chicago" problem, solved in under a minute. No spreadsheet detective work, no digging through old emails for a ticket receipt.
One more position while I am at it: the fuzzy shows are worth recovering. They are usually fuzzier because they were further back, not because they mattered less. Some of my favorite entries in my own history are shows I could not have dated within a year before I looked them up. If you have a lot of these, the longer guide on catching up on years of past concerts walks through the full backfill process.
From Lead Sheet to Archive
Once the imports land, spend a little time turning entries into memories. Not equal time. Triage.
Recent shows get the full treatment: a couple of photos from your camera roll, a rating, who you went with, your favorite song off the attached setlist. Two or three minutes each, while the details are still warm.
Old shows get 30 seconds. Confirm the date looks right, maybe tap a favorite song if one jumps out from the setlist, move on. You can always come back when a photo surfaces or a memory resurfaces. The entry existing at all is the win.
And then the part your RSVP list could never do: the stats start working. Most-seen artists, shows per year, venue counts. Mine told me I had seen one band six times across three states, which I half knew, and that 2019 was my biggest year by a wide margin, which I did not. A lead sheet cannot do that. An archive can. If you want the full tour of what the app does once your history is in it, the complete guide to the Concerts Remembered app covers it.
Keep Bandsintown Doing What It's Good At
None of this is an argument for deleting Bandsintown. Keep it. Keep the alerts on. Discovery and memory are different jobs, and you are better off with a tool built for each than one app doing both badly.
Bandsintown tells you who is coming to town. The Concerts Remembered app holds what you saw and what it meant. The handoff between them takes seconds: Bandsintown alerts you, you go to the show, you log it when you get home. The two tools are not competitors any more than a weather app competes with a photo album.
If you are weighing other trackers first, the honest comparison in our best concert apps roundup is a fair place to start, and if you also have years locked in Songkick, the Songkick migration guide covers that side.
Your RSVP trail has been sitting there for years, half memory and half maybe. Give the shows you actually attended somewhere to live. Start with the paste, chase the fuzzy ones with Help Me Find It, and get the Concerts Remembered app if you have not already.
FAQ
Can I export my Bandsintown history directly?
Bandsintown does not offer a one-click export file for your RSVP history the way some services do. What you can do is view your past events on your profile and copy the list as text. That copied text is enough: the Concerts Remembered import tool parses freeform text, so a rough copy-paste of your past events page turns into draft shows with artist, venue, date, and location filled in. No file format required.
Does Concerts Remembered connect to my Bandsintown account?
No. There is no account linking or direct sync. You bring your history over yourself, either by pasting your past-events list into the web import tool or by looking shows up individually with the in-app Help Me Find It flow. That is deliberate: a blind sync would import every RSVP as an attended show, and roughly a third of most people's RSVPs were never attended.
What about shows I marked "interested" but never RSVP'd "going" to?
Treat them as leads like everything else. Paste them in with the rest and use the review step to keep only the ones you actually attended. "Interested" entries are often the best memory prompts on the whole list, because they include shows you decided on late.
How do I find a show when I only remember the band and roughly the year?
Use the Help Me Find It flow in the app. Type the band name, tap Help me find it, and narrow by city or year. The app shows the artist's real show history from setlist.fm data, and you pick out your night, usually by recognizing the venue. One tap imports it, setlist included.
Do setlists really attach automatically?
Yes, when the data exists. Both import paths draw on setlist.fm, which has strong coverage for touring acts over the past couple of decades. Small local shows and openers are spottier. When a setlist is available it attaches to the imported show automatically, and you can mark favorite songs from it.
Should I stop using Bandsintown after importing?
No. Bandsintown is still one of the best discovery tools going, and this is not a replacement pitch. Keep it for tour alerts and finding shows. Use Concerts Remembered for the record of what you attended. Different jobs, different tools.
How long does importing years of history actually take?
The paste itself takes minutes. Copy your past events, paste, review the drafts, delete the shows you skipped, confirm the rest. Reviewing a 60-show list is mostly a series of quick yes-or-no calls. The fuzzy shows take under a minute each with Help Me Find It. Budget an evening only if you want to add photos and notes as you go, which, fair warning, is easy to get lost in.
What if a show is not in setlist.fm at all?
You can still add it manually with whatever details you have: artist, venue, date, city. The entry counts toward your stats either way, and you can attach a setlist later if the data ever appears. A show without a setlist is still a show you saw. The app's Find My Concert search can also track down a fuzzy show from just the artist, setlist attached. For more approaches to reconstructing undocumented nights, see our guide to finding your concert history.
Share: