How to Find Your Past Gigs Using Instagram and Facebook

Both platforms let you download your own history from Meta’s Accounts Centre (under “Your information and permissions” → “Download your information”). Choose JSON format and include your posts, stories, and media. The media matters, because gig posters are where the venue and date usually live. Facebook users should also include events. Large exports arrive as more than one ZIP file; keep them all.

Doing this manually means going post by post, looking for:

• Gig posters and event artwork (venue, date, and lineup in the image itself)
• Captions announcing shows, e.g. “this Friday at...” or “doors 8pm”
• Venue tags, check-ins, and location stickers on stories
• Facebook events you hosted or played

For a year or more of history this is hours of squinting at screenshots. It’s the exact job Royalty Ready automates: upload the ZIPs and it scans every post, story, caption, and poster (including reading the posters themselves), detects likely live performances, matches venue names to their likely addresses, and de-duplicates the same gig announced three different ways.

Whichever way you mine it, the goal is a clean row per gig: venue, date, performer, and what you played. Watch for the classic traps: a tour poster is one post but many gigs; a city name (“Brisbane!”) is not a venue; and the same show often appears as a poster, a story, and a day-after thank-you post. In Royalty Ready you review each detected gig with its evidence next to it, fix anything the scan got wrong, and confirm. Nothing goes anywhere without your say-so.

A gig list only becomes money once each gig is reported to APRA AMCOS. here’s what goes into a Performance Report. APRA AMCOS only accepts backdated reports within their current window, so the oldest gigs in your export are the most urgent.