Fifteen Years of "I Was There"
If you've been on Songkick since the early days, you know the ritual. Show ends, ears ringing, you're on the night bus home, and you open the app to tap "I was there." That tap was the entire ceremony. No photo upload, no review, no rating. Just a small, satisfying confirmation that tonight happened.
Do that for long enough and you end up with something quietly remarkable: a gigography that goes back further than your photo library. Maybe it starts in 2011 with a band that broke up before your current phone existed. Maybe it's 137 gigs deep. Songkick has been around since 2007, and millions of people used that "gigs I've been to" feature to build attendance records they never could have reconstructed from memory.
Here's the position this whole article rests on: that data is real and it's worth something. It might be the most complete record of your live music life that exists anywhere. And it deserves better than sitting untouched in an app you mostly open for tour alerts.
What Songkick Still Does Well
Let's be clear about what this article is not. It's not a takedown. Songkick earned its place on your home screen.
The artist tracking is genuinely good. You tell it who you care about, it watches tour announcements, and one day a notification lands: your favorite band, your city, tickets on sale Friday at 10am. If you've ever gotten seats to a show that sold out in four minutes because Songkick pinged you first, you know that notification has paid for itself many times over. The tour alert engine, the calendar integration, the "artists on tour near you" feed. All of it still works, and all of it is still a legitimate reason to keep the app installed.
But Songkick is a discovery tool. It answers the question "what's coming up?" It was never really designed to answer "what did I see, and what did it mean?" Product updates on the tracking side have slowed over the years, and the attendance feature in particular has stayed what it always was: a list. That's not a failure. It's just a different job.
The Layer a Gigography Can't Hold
Open your Songkick attended list right now and scroll to something from five or six years ago. What do you actually have? Artist, venue, date, maybe the lineup. That's it. That's everything.
Now think about what's missing. No setlist. No photos. No note about who stood next to you. No rating, no favorite song, nothing about the moment the whole room went quiet before the last chorus. If your list has 137 gigs on it, be honest: how many could you actually describe? Twenty? The other 117 are dates and venue names, and the memories attached to them are evaporating on a schedule you don't control.
This is the core distinction, and it's worth stating plainly: attendance data is the skeleton of a concert history, not the history. The skeleton matters. You can't rebuild the body without it. But a list that says you saw The National at the O2 Academy in 2013 tells you nothing about the show, and every year that passes, your brain quietly deletes a little more of what that line used to mean.
If you want the full argument for why concert memories need active preservation, we wrote about it in our guide to finding your concert history. The short version: the skeleton is step one. You still need the rest.
Getting Your List Out
Songkick doesn't offer a one-click export of your attended gigs, so this part is manual. The good news is that it takes about two minutes.
- Sign in to Songkick on a desktop browser. This works on mobile too, but selecting text is easier with a mouse.
- Open your profile and find your gigography, the "gigs I've been to" list. It's your full attendance record, usually sorted newest to oldest.
- Select and copy the whole thing. Click at the top, drag to the bottom, copy. If the list is paginated, copy each page. Paste it all into a note, an email draft to yourself, anywhere it can sit safely.
Do not worry about formatting. Seriously. You'll get artist names, venues, dates, and city names all jumbled together with whatever page furniture comes along for the ride. That's fine. The next step is built to parse messy freeform text, so a chaotic paste works just as well as a tidy spreadsheet.
Two edge cases worth mentioning. If you only have screenshots of your list, transcribe just the artist and the year for each show. Venue and exact date can be recovered later, since tour dates are public record. And if your list is long, copy all of it now even if you only plan to process some of it. Here's position number two: a messy copy-paste today beats a perfect export you keep meaning to do. The list you save tonight is the one that survives.
One Paste Into a Real Archive
This is where the skeleton gets its body back.
The Concerts Remembered app has a web import tool that exists for exactly this situation. You paste in whatever you copied from Songkick, unedited, and it parses the text into draft shows: artist, venue, date, location. Fifteen years of gigography becomes a review screen instead of a data entry project. You scan the drafts, fix anything the parser got wrong, and confirm. There's a walkthrough of the whole flow in our complete guide to the app if you want to see it before you start.
Then the part that makes the migration worth it: as shows are added, setlists attach automatically from setlist.fm data. That 2013 show you couldn't describe? Suddenly you're looking at the actual songs, in order, and it's remarkable how fast a setlist un-deletes a memory. You can mark your favorite song from any night, which is a small feature that turns out to matter a lot when you're scrolling back through a decade.
For the memory layer itself, use triage. Don't try to fully document 137 shows in one sitting; that's how migrations die. Recent shows, the last year or two, get the full treatment: photos from your camera roll, a rating, who you went with, the favorite song. Older shows get 30 seconds each. Glance at the setlist, add one line if something surfaces, move on. Thirty seconds times a hundred shows is under an hour, and it beats the alternative, which is nothing. We've got a full strategy for catching up on years of past concerts if your backlog is intimidating. And when a show's date or venue is fuzzy, the app's Find My Concert search tracks down the exact night, setlist included.
What the Migrated Archive Gives Back
A gigography is read-only. An archive talks back.
Once your history is in, the stats start working across the whole 15 years at once. Your most-seen artists, ranked, which will surprise you. The band you'd have guessed at number one is often number three, and some opener you followed for years is quietly sitting near the top. Venue counts that reveal you've spent more nights in one sweaty 400-cap room than anywhere else on earth. Era patterns, like the year you saw 19 shows and the two years you saw four, which map onto your life more precisely than any journal you failed to keep.
This is the difference between storage and memory. If you've ever wished there were a Letterboxd for concerts, a place where logging shows builds into something with shape and personality, this is that. Your Songkick list was the raw material all along. It just needed somewhere to become something.
And here's position number three: your gigography is worth preserving even if you never open Songkick again. Migrate it for its own sake. What you do with the app afterward is a separate decision.
Keep Songkick for What It's Good At
You don't have to choose, and honestly you probably shouldn't.
Keep Songkick installed if the tour alerts still serve you. It remains one of the better discovery tools out there, and there's no prize for app minimalism if it costs you a presale. Use it to find out what's coming. Then use a dedicated tracker to hold what you saw and what it meant. Discovery and memory are different jobs, and the tools built for each are better than one tool doing both badly. Our best concert apps roundup breaks down which tools fit which job if you want the full landscape.
Your "gigs I've been to" list took you 15 years to build, one tap at a time on one night bus after another. Tonight it takes two minutes to copy and one paste to bring home. Get the Concerts Remembered app and give it somewhere to live.
FAQ
Can I connect Songkick directly to Concerts Remembered?
No. There's no direct integration, because Songkick doesn't offer a public export of attended gigs. The migration is manual: copy your gigography from your Songkick profile, then paste it into the app's web import tool, which parses the text into draft shows for you to review and confirm. In practice the whole extraction takes a couple of minutes, and the paste does the heavy lifting.
Is Songkick shutting down?
We have no reason to say that, and this article doesn't claim it. Songkick's discovery features and tour alerts still work, though updates to the tracking side of the product have slowed over the years. The argument here isn't "abandon ship." It's that attendance data locked in any single app is fragile, and a list you built over 15 years deserves a copy somewhere designed to hold memories, not just dates.
What if my Songkick list has hundreds of shows?
Copy all of it anyway. The import tool parses long pastes into draft shows, so volume isn't the bottleneck; your review time is. Use triage: confirm everything, give recent shows the full memory treatment, and give older shows about 30 seconds each. A 200-show backlog is a couple of relaxed evenings, not a project.
Will I lose venue or date details in the paste?
Usually not, because Songkick's list includes artist, venue, date, and city, and the parser picks those up. If something comes through garbled, you fix it on the draft review screen before confirming. Worst case, an artist name plus a year is enough to add the show, and the correct date and venue can be filled in later from public tour records.
Do setlists really attach automatically?
Yes, from setlist.fm data. When a show is added and a matching setlist exists, it attaches to the entry without you doing anything. Coverage is strongest for touring acts from roughly the last two decades, which lines up well with most Songkick gigographies. Small local shows may have no setlist on record, in which case you can note what you remember.
Should I delete Songkick after migrating?
Only if it's not earning its spot. If the tour alerts and artist tracking still get you tickets, keep it. The two tools do different jobs: Songkick tells you what's coming, your archive holds what happened. Running both costs you nothing but a home screen slot.
What about my upcoming shows and tracked artists on Songkick?
Those stay in Songkick, and that's fine. This migration is about your attendance history, the "gigs I've been to" list. Your tracked artists and upcoming plans are discovery data, which is exactly the job Songkick is still good at. Migrate the past, let Songkick keep watching the future.
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