A Thousand Gigs

Every single day, all over the world, human beings perform music in front of other human beings. This happens in public and private areas, large and small, in what is probably the most widespread communal cultural activity that we engage in, and yet almost none of it is recorded. There is some information available about famous performances by major artists which occasionally includes setlists, but even this is patchy and reliant on enthusiastic fans, and the fact that it is concentrated on such a tiny subset of performances ignores the vast majority of what actually goes on.

This dataset provides a tiny snapshot of some of this other activity. It contains details of the one thousand gigs I performed between 3 February 1988 and 2 February 2023, derived mostly from the database used to run my website, www.mjhibbett.co.uk, with the addition of some private data held about merchandising sales at gigs. My hope is that providing this data for analysis will encourage others to do the same, and thus start to provide a more balanced view of live music performance.