Live aid: Fans build the setlist

What is Taylor Swift likely to belt out at her next gig? A crowd-sourced platform, where fans meticulously submit setlists of their favourite artists, is changing concert culture

- Bhanuj Kappal

In the early 2000s, as a cub reporter writing my first gig reviews, I worried all the time about getting the setlist wrong.

I would stand in the front row, notebook in hand, jotting down every track a band played.

The major bands weren't much of a problem. But the unfamiliar acts, and (oh God) the independent bands, could mean hours of forensic digging. Track down the band manager and hope they had a list; scour a fledgling internet hoping chat forums would hold clues. Get a single track wrong, and one risked having one’s credibility called into question (there are few media critics as brutal as music fandoms).

Today, such anxiety feels almost quaint.

Within minutes of a gig ending — sometimes before the encore confetti has had time to hit the floor — the entire list of songs performed has been uploaded to Setlist.fm. This free, Wikipedia-style platform has quietly become the world’s most comprehensive archive of live performance data.

Created in 2008 by the Austrian media agency Molindo and powered by volunteers around the world, the website now hosts over 9.7 million setlists as performed by over 438,000 artists.