A friend had told me that they'd been to a concert on the previous Tuesday. At the time, I forgot to follow up during the conversation because we were distracted by other topics. A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn't know who they'd seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And, I realized I knew approximately where it was because I saw their walk to the venue on Strava. 🙌🏼 <pullquote width="10em" align="right">The purpose of today's Internet is to facilitate commerce, not knowledge.</pullquote>Even with the venue and date in hand, though, it's not very easy to find information about past concerts in our Internet. The Internet was conceived as a <i>knowledge</i> machine, but was nearly immediately coopted for <i>commerce</i>. It is so geared to tell us about stuff we can buy that search engines can only return links about upcoming events, with <i>ticket sales</i>. Even the home pages of the venues themselves will tell you nothing about events that happened a few days ago. I couldn't find a "this year's events" calendar, to say nothing of a "past events" calendar. Simply typing the venue name and the date, like "Volkshaus Zürich 16.01.2024" returned nothing useful. I gave up pretty quickly, as it was late. In the morning, I tried again, typing "how to find out about past concert dates", which returned me the <a href="https://www.concertarchives.org/">Concert Archives</a>, which has an easily browseable list of all concerts on a day, by venue, by city, etc. Now I know that my metalhead friend went to see <a href="https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/beast-in-black-gloryhammer-f85dad51-01b6-488c-84c8-e55b04c07d40">Beast In Black / Gloryhammer / Brothers of Metal</a>. <img src="{att_link}concert_archives_result.jpg" href="{att_link}concert_archives_result.jpg" align="none" scale="75%">