Concerts Archive
Live music may be cancelled, but I can still try to document the shows I've been to already.
The first concert I ever went to was Arcade Fire on the Reflektor Tour in Brooklyn. This was back in 2014 and now six years later I'm at 45 shows and counting (although perhaps not for a while now). I’m a big live music fan and would go to concerts regularly, so I decided to create a record of them before I started to forget.
I used to just keep Notes doc with details like date, venue, openers, headliners and friends that I went with, but I also had files upon files of photos and videos that I'd saved from each one. There was so much from each show that I wanted to document and a text doc just wouldn't cut it.
Enter AirTable!
I started this project right after the development of Since Parkland and took the opportunity to reinforce what I learned from there. Using the same tech stack (Jekyll + Airtable), I was able to get a prototype up and running in no time.
While choosing a familiar tech stack helped me jumpstart things, I very quickly (on this very slow moving project) ran into technical questions/limitations. For starters: how the heck do I upload, store and stream videos from each show?! I have A TON of video and that's ultimately the highlight of what I hope to showcase with this project.
I haven't given too much thought to some of these questions just yet, and this project has been collecting dust for quite some time now. But even in the meantime, what I have now has come in pretty handy as a reference for myself.
There are a lot of directions I'd like to explore with this project, especially regarding music genres. I'm curious to see what I might find if I look at past shows through the lens of genre, venues or cities. But in the end, I just hope to build a digital keepsake out of this — like an interactive scrapbook that can take me back to these concerts (and without a single mask in sight).