2018, By the Numbers

Today is the day, my friends. The day I get to bust out the spreadsheet I maintain all year with my concert-going data and do some year-end and year-over-year analysis. Spending the day in Excel is a beautiful way to kick off the new year. I’m only kind of joking. Let’s see what happened last year, shall we?

60 shows this year. I’m okay with this, despite that the number has dropped significantly since my highest of 115 shows in 2015. I don’t know if I got any sleep that year.

1 out of every 6 shows I went to was at Brooklyn Bowl, my #1 venue for the third year running. Worth also noting that even though only 1 venue I went to last year has now closed (Output, I’ll miss you!), American Beauty, which was in my top venues list in 2017, also closed in 2018. And Webster Hall just posted on social media that they’re reopening in 2019! I’m excited and afraid to see what the new venue will be like.

I went to 12 shows for free, but for the first time ever, none of the shows I went to for free were actually free. I’m pretty shocked that I somehow didn’t go to any free concerts in 2018 because NYC is usually full of them in the summer. But at least I’m still pretty good at winning tickets to things.

I’m going to say this pretty much every year that this comes up – of the 6 shows I paid more than face value for, all 6 of them were due to me not making full use of my Jukely membership in those months. I pay $35 a month for the service, but in December, for example, I only used it to go to one show, the face value of which was somewhere around $17. It balances out because there are months where I get hundreds of dollars worth of concerts for $35, but I still hate those wasted months.

ODESZA 4EVER. I didn’t even bother adding the second place artists here because there were a bunch that I only saw twice, which doesn’t always feel significant.

Pretty impressed that I went to 4 shows in 4 days. I wouldn’t typically count this because 2 of those days were Bungawiz Music Festival and I don’t usually include festival days in the count, but the day after Bungawiz I went to Panorama, and the day after that I went to Kesha and Macklemore on Jones Beach, and all of that involved a lot of traveling, so I’m allowing it.

April has come back from the dead of being my month with fewest shows to my month with the most shows. Well done, April.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to coordinate a day where I match something I did in 2015 and go to 3 legitimate shows in 1 day. I kind of did it this year but I didn’t stay at the 3rd one for more than a few minutes, so it really shouldn’t count. But I’ve woven it into all my other stats, so…it stays.

And as I always do in this post, here are some highlights from the notes I put into my spreadsheet about the shows I went to:

“I left after the 3rd subpar opening act because it was taking too long and it was too cold for life.” (RZA at City Winery)

“The guy from Zeds Dead turned Eleanor Rigby into a trap banger. He went there.” (I’m still in awe of this)

“I like the weird monster voice thing he does.” (Thriftworks at the Knitting Factory)

“All the hits and some Disney deep cuts.” (The Little Mermen, a Disney cover band, at Gramercy Theatre)

“Man, I think I’m just not that into dubstep anymore. I was just not having any more of those heavy wub wubs.”

“There was a car on fire.” (Twenty One Pilots at MSG)