Finding past concerts

A friend had told me that they’d been to a concert on the previous Tuesday. At the time, I forgot to follow up during the conversation because we were distracted by other topics.

A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn’t know who they’d seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And, I realized I knew approximately where it was because I saw their walk to the venue on Strava. 🙌🏼

The purpose of today’s Internet is to facilitate commerce, not knowledge.

Even with the venue and date in hand, though, it’s not very easy to find information about past concerts in our Internet.

The Internet was conceived as a knowledge machine, but was nearly immediately coopted for commerce. It is so geared to tell us about stuff we can buy that search engines can only return links about upcoming events, with ticket sales.

Even the home pages of the venues themselves will tell you nothing about events that happened a few days ago. I couldn’t find a “this year’s events” calendar, to say nothing of a “past events” calendar.

Simply typing the venue name and the date, like “Volkshaus Zürich 16.01.2024” returned nothing useful. I gave up pretty quickly, as it was late.

In the morning, I tried again, typing “how to find out about past concert dates”, which returned me the Concert Archives, which has an easily browseable list of all concerts on a day, by venue, by city, etc. Now I know that my metalhead friend went to see Beast In Black / Gloryhammer / Brothers of Metal.