Setlist.fm Imports are Finally Here! 🎉🎉🎉

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For a long time, one of the most Requested Features has been the ability to import your concerts from Setlist.fm into Concert Archives. We’re super happy to announce that we have finally released this feature!!! 🎉

This feature has been a long time coming due to some challenges with Setlist.fm’s unique data structure. 😅

What Challenges?

The biggest obstacle is that Setlist.fm doesn’t allow a concert listing to contain multiple bands. That means that there is a separate concert listing for each band that performed.

For example, if there were 4 bands at a concert, then there are 4 different concert pages on Setlist.fm. What about a festival with 100 bands? Yep, 100 different concerts pages! 😅 

So simply pulling in the data as-is would have led to a lot of duplication and clutter. And as you may already know, “The Big Clean” is one of our ongoing high priority tasks.

If you’re not familiar, “The Big Clean” is our project to clean and standardize data on Concert Archives. This includes merging duplicate bands, venues, locations, and concerts. Adding a whole bunch of duplicates would only slow that progress and make the site a lot more cluttered.

So How Did We Overcome This Issue?

We were able to resolve this issue, by combining a lot of the tools we’ve built for “The Big Clean” that automatically clean and process data.

For example:

• The Concert Auto-Merge Feature continually looks for duplicate concert listings and merges them together (it’s automatically merged almost 1,000,000 duplicate concerts since we launched it in 2023). This is especially important for Setlist.fm imports because it can merge concerts that only have 1 band listed and merge them into the more comprehensive concert listing that has multiple bands.
• Aliases for Bands, Venues, and Locations help avoid duplicate entries by recognizing alternate names.
• Location Aliases for Venues prevents duplicate venue listings caused by inconsistent location data for specific venues.
• Location Standardization Dictionaries converts abbreviated location info (e.g. Portland, OR, USA) into our standardized format (Portland, Oregon, United States).

The new Setlist.fm Import feature is a perfect example of how our long-term mindset pays off.

When we first started Concert Archives (over 11 years ago!!!) importing from Setlist.fm would have been impossible without creating a huge mess. But with consistent effort and improvements over many years, we’re accomplishing more than we could have ever expected.

Thank you to our Patrons for helping us make Concert Archives better every day! Their support enables us to keep pushing forward, making the platform more useful, sustainable, and awesome for concert lovers everywhere. 🫶