2009: Year in Review

Looking back at 2009, I went to a hell of a lot of concerts. Though I only started tracking it this year, I can still confidently say that I attended more concerts this year than I had in any previous year. I’m also really glad that I started writing this blog this year, a perfect meshing of my two loves, live music and verbose memoirs. Though I’ll probably be the only one interested in them, I’ve compiled a statistical review of my concert experiences for the year.

I attended 34 concerts and festivals this year, including 28 individual shows and 6 festivals, averaging a concert event a little over every 10 days. 18 of these concerts were sold out. Clearly, my venue of choice was the 9:30 Club in DC, where I saw 10 shows this year. A distance second was Merriweather Post Pavilion with 3. A majority of shows were in the DC metro area; though I did attended shows in 3 other states (all festivals) and my first in another country (Canada counts, right?). Though I saw shows on every day of the week and nearly every month of the year (except for February for some reason), not surprisingly, the month of August and Saturday evenings stood out as having way above the average. Nine of my events occurred within 26 days at the end of July through mid August, including 4 Saturdays in a row.

Including all the bands that I specifically remember seeing at festivals for at least a few songs (more than just walking by), I saw a total of 72 bands this year, of which 43 were bands that I’d never seen before, while the remaining 29 were old favorites. This excludes opening acts that didn’t receive billing. Festivals were a great place for me to see new music, as I saw 29 new bands for the first time at festivals, versus individual concerts, where I was split (14 apiece) between old and new. I saw Phish more times than any other band in 2009, including 2 individual concerts and 2 shows at festivals. I saw 10 other bands twice, half including bands I had seen before this year (Guster, Modest Mouse, moe., Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band) and half bands I had never seen before 2009 (Decemberists, Flaming Lips, Girl Talk, MGMT, Passion Pit).

Concerts are always more fun with friends, and I was able to convince someone to come with me to every concert. Jeff Schiz was clearly my concert buddy of choice, as he and I attended 17 events together (including 4 festivals). Lauren (7), Benji (7), Kaitlin (5), and Joey (5) fell into the next tier, even though I didn’t attend a concert with Lauren before mid July of this year and didn’t attend one after the end of August and the end of July with Benji and Kaitlin, respectively.

What a year! And it only cost me $1,468 in tickets!