Festivals, Finally

If you were thinking about adding Coachella or Outside Lands or Riot Fest to Concert Calendar before - good luck! It would have been a rats nest of individual ‘concerts’ tied together by 10 misspelled ‘Festivals’. We wanted to make that better. Today, we did.

Festivals are live. And they are not — repeat, not — eighty concerts in a list.

Why this took a minute

A concert is a beautifully simple thing. One venue. One date. A short list of bands. Doors at 7, show at 8, you’re home by 2 am feeling vaguely transcendent.

A festival is a different animal. Multiple stages running at once. Maybe three days, but you can only be in town for Friday and Saturday. Forty-seven bands who are all awesome, but you actually care about making sure you see twelve, four of whom are inexplicably scheduled at the same time on different stages. (Why do they do this to us? It’s personal, isn’t it?)

We could’ve cheated and made the existing concert model stretch to fit. We tried. It looked like one of those DIY projects that you paid more for someone to come fix than it would’ve cost to just pay them to do it at the start. So we built a real festival model instead. Stages. Performances. Per-day attendance. Per-set picks. The works.

What you get in v1

Festival pages that know what a festival is. Name, dates, location, lineup, the stages, the schedule. Friends who are going, broken out by which day(s) they’re there. Photos and ratings, separate from any one set.

The schedule grid. Day across the top, stages down the side, every set in its slot. Tap the ones you want to catch and they go on your personal pick list. The grid highlights conflicts in screaming amber when you’ve picked two things in the same time block, because you will do this and we will catch you. (Don’t worry. The grid won’t make you choose. Pick both if you want. We’re not here to be your mom.)

Per-day attendance. You’re only there Friday and Saturday? That’s real life, not a workaround. Your “festivals attended” and “festival-days attended” stats both reflect it. Picks for Sunday’s bands are sweet, but don’t enter the picture.

A different add flow for festivals. The regular “add a concert” modal stays exactly where it is — same one button, same fast path. But if you’re adding something with its own brand and multiple stages, there’s now a clear “Adding a festival? →” link that opens a proper builder. Basics, then stages, then the lineup grid. Wizard-style, not crammed into one terrible modal that scrolls forever.

Festival-level ratings. Four items, ideally the things you actually rant or rave about in the car on the way home: organization (lines, signage, flow), vibe (if we have to explain vibe, just go now), food/drink, and value. Per-set ratings live on the performance itself, so “I rated Mitski a 4.5 at Outside Lands” lives in the right place instead of bleeding into a venue rating for a fairground that hosts forty events a year.

Bands seen counts both worlds. You saw Phoebe Bridgers at a club show in 2023 and at a festival in 2026? She counts once in your “bands seen” lifetime list, with both shows in her detail page. Concerts seen and festivals attended are tracked separately, because they kind of are separate experiences. But the people you saw play? One number. One list.

Chat at festivals = Crews

If you missed it, we shipped Crews a bit ago. Catch up. That matters here because the obvious question is “where’s the festival group chat?” Answer: in your crew. When two or more crewmates RSVP to the same festival, a crew chat for that festival activates automatically. Same model as concerts. There is no festival-wide chat that admits forty thousand strangers, because — honestly, can you imagine? — that’s a slow-motion nightmare and we’re not going to ship one.

Things we deliberately punted

Cross-year series. Coachella 2025 ↔ Coachella 2026 will eventually link as the same series (“you’ve been to Coachella four times”), and the data model already supports it. The UI doesn’t. Yet. We’re a small team. Not height-wise, more like total people.

Lineup scraping. No automated ingest from festival APIs or web scraping. Initial lineups are entered manually, with crowdsourced edits after. We’d rather have ten right than a thousand half-wrong.

Cruise festivals as their own thing. Yes, we see you. Doesn’t mean we approve of you, but… Later.

How to try it

Add any of the festivals you’re planning to hit. The full lineup might not be there yet — be the hero that adds it. Once you’ve RSVP’d by day, tap into the schedule grid and start starring sets. The conflicts will yell at you in orange. Embrace it.

We’d love to hear what breaks, what’s confusing, and what we got wrong. hello@concertcalendar.app — same address, same humans on the other side.

Now go plan your summer.

— The Concert Calendar team