An app to track concerts: 5 apps compared (2026)

There are roughly two kinds of concert apps: apps that remember where you have been (Concert Archives, Setlist.fm) and apps that warn you about what is coming (Songkick, Bandsintown) — plus one app that puts the concerts you attended next to your albums, books and films (MyCultBox). This guide lines up those five on what they track, whether they have setlists, what they cost and which platforms they run on, and says for each app where it is better than the others.

Two questions that often get mixed up

Anyone searching for "an app to track concerts" usually means one of two very different things. The first is an archive: which concerts have I seen, when, in which venue, with whom, and how many times have I actually seen that one band live. The second is a calendar: which artists I like are playing nearby soon, and when does the ticket sale open. The confusion comes from both kinds of app using the same words — "following concerts" — while they have almost nothing to do with each other.

That difference decides your choice more than any feature does. An app built for ticket alerts has little reason to keep fifteen years of your history neatly or to let you export it; an archive app does not need ticket integration. In practice, many people therefore use two: one that warns, one that remembers. That is not a failure of the apps, it is an honest division of labor. So first work out which of the two questions you are asking — the rest of this guide is organized around that distinction, app by app.

Concert Archives

Concert Archives is the archive app in its purest form: a database of, by its own account, more than 12 million concerts, into which you put every show and festival you have seen, with photos, videos and notes. Alongside that you can keep a bucket list of future shows. The app shows the setlists the bands played at the concerts in your history.

What sets it apart are the statistics and the community. You see your total number of concerts, which artists you have seen most often and your history by year; you can follow friends and look at their concert history, photos and bucket list, and you get notifications on concert anniversaries. You can import from Setlist.fm, Songkick and spreadsheets.

The basic app is free with in-app purchases; Pro costs $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year, Pro+ $8.99 per month or $89.99 per year. There are native apps for iOS (including iPad, Mac and Watch) and Android, alongside the website.

Where Concert Archives is better than MyCultBox: the statistics per artist and venue, and above all the community. Thousands of other concertgoers have recorded the same night, with photos attached. MyCultBox does not have that and will not have it any time soon.

Setlist.fm

Setlist.fm is not a tracker but a wiki: more than 10.5 million setlists by 474,000 artists in 455,000 venues, maintained by the attendees themselves. Free, with artist, venue and festival pages and an open API.

You can track, but modestly: with the "I Was There" button on a setlist you mark that you were there, and on your profile those concerts are then grouped together, with statistics. In your privacy settings you can set that list to be visible only to you. What is not there: a documented export function for the concerts you attended. The FAQ does not mention an official mobile app either; what you find in the app stores are third-party apps running on the API.

Where Setlist.fm is unbeatable: the setlist database itself. Which songs were played that night, in which order, with which covers and encores — nowhere else is that recorded so completely. MyCultBox has no setlist database of its own and never will; it reads the one from setlist.fm.

Songkick

Songkick looks ahead. You follow artists — manually or through an import from your music library, Apple Music, Spotify or Facebook — and get a message as soon as they play nearby. On top of that come concert listings by city, festivals, recommendations based on your taste, reminders for ticket sales, integration with Apple Calendar and Google Calendar, and links to tickets. According to the App Store listing, more than 15 million people use it.

Free to download, with no mandatory in-app purchases. There are apps for iOS and Android, plus the website.

You can mark a past concert as attended, but keeping a complete history is not what the app was made for, and a public export of the concerts you attended is missing.

Where Songkick is better than MyCultBox: upcoming concerts. MyCultBox has no ticket alerts and does not warn you about anything. If you want to know when your favorite band is playing, Songkick was built for that and MyCultBox was not.

Bandsintown

Bandsintown does the same kind of work as Songkick and is the better known of the two. You follow artists or connect Spotify or Apple Music, and get a notification when a show nearby is announced. Beyond that: search concerts, festivals and venues worldwide, set reminders, buy tickets from official sellers, read reviews and ask an artist to come and play in your city too.

According to its own App Store listing the app is completely free, with no hidden costs, and it runs on iOS, Android, the Amazon Appstore and the web. TIME put it on its Best Apps of the Year list.

Where Bandsintown is better than MyCultBox: the coverage and the notifications. Bandsintown is one of the places where artists publish their tour dates themselves, often earlier than elsewhere, and it costs nothing. If all you want is to know what is coming, you do not need to install anything else — and MyCultBox adds nothing to that.

MyCultBox

MyCultBox is not a concert app but a culture library with four categories: books, films, music and concerts. The idea is that a concert has the same standing as an album or a book: you can import the concerts you attended from setlist.fm, and a concert like that then sits in the same library as the album by the same artist and as the artist themselves. At the end of the year the concert from July sits in the same "Year in Culture" retrospective as the book you read in March. You can publicly share individual items and lists through a share page.

It is a web app (PWA) in Dutch and English; there is no app in the App Store or Play Store. Free up to 100 items, without a credit card. Pro costs €4.99 per month or €49.99 per year; there is a fourteen-day trial that unlocks the Pro features, but the limit of 100 items stays in place during that period.

Honest about the downsides: no warnings about upcoming concerts and no ticket alerts, no native app, a small community, and no setlist database of its own — that comes from setlist.fm. If all you track is concerts, Concert Archives gives you more, for free.

Comparison table

Which should you choose?

Do you want to know when your favorite artists are playing and when the ticket sale starts? Bandsintown or Songkick — both free, both with native apps, and no archive app does this.

Do you want to know exactly which songs were played that night? Setlist.fm, and nothing else.

Do you want the most complete possible archive of everything you have seen, with statistics per artist and venue and other concertgoers alongside? Concert Archives.

Do you want the concerts you attended next to your albums, books and films in one library and one year in review, and do you accept that there are no ticket alerts and no native app? Then MyCultBox was made for that situation.

See also: The best apps to track books, films, music and concerts and A Goodreads alternative that also tracks your films, music and concerts.