How to Find an Artist's Past Tour Dates (Any Year)

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-08-16 · 7 min read

Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.

Sooner or later every music fan needs to answer one of these: When did they last tour? Was that show 2016 or 2017? Did they even play my city that year — and was I there?

Future tour dates are easy; every ticket seller lists them. Past tour dates are strangely hard. Ticket pages get taken down, venue listings expire, and the further back you go, the more the internet forgets. Here is what Gigvault's archive actually holds — counted, not estimated — and how to reconstruct the years it does not.

What the archive holds, by decade

Gigvault has 15,204 approved concerts by 4,614 artists in 1,647 cities across 67 countries, as of 12 September 2026. The oldest entry is Hawkwind in London on 13 August 1972. But the distribution matters more than the total:

Eighty-eight percent of the archive is from 2020 onwards. If the show you are trying to place was in 2023, the odds are good. If it was in 1994, the archive holds 154 concerts from that whole decade, and the method below is what you will actually need.

The artists whose history reaches furthest back

Where the archive is deep, it is genuinely deep. These are the acts with the longest span between their first and most recent logged show:

In total, 118 artists in Gigvault have shows spanning twenty years or more, and 311 have ten shows or more. Iron Maiden's page starts with Manchester in October 1986 and runs through New York 1987 and Philadelphia 1988 before the 2026 run of 51 dates — which is exactly the shape a tour history should have: a few anchors from the decades before, and dense coverage of the recent years.

It is also honest about the gaps. Radiohead has seven shows logged: Manchester 1996 and 1997, Jersey City 2001, Camden and New York 2003, then nothing until London 2025 and Red Rocks 2026. Twenty-two years between entries. That gap is not a claim that they did not tour; it is where nobody has logged a show yet.

Start with the year, not the tour

If you're trying to place a show, don't start from the tour name — most people don't know it. Start from the year you think it was, and accept it might be the year either side.

Three anchors usually pin the year down fast:

The album. Tours follow releases. If you know which album they were touring, the tour started within a year of that release date, almost without exception. "The show where they played the new stuff from X" dates itself.

Your own life. Where were you living? Which job? Who did you go with? "I was still living in the old flat" cuts the candidate years in half faster than any database.

Your camera roll and email. Search the suspected years for dark photos with stage lights, and your inbox for the artist's name. One ticket confirmation ends the whole investigation.

Reconstruct the routing

Once you have a candidate year, the tour's routing tells you if your show fits.

Tours move in legs: a European run, a North American run, festival season in the summer. If the artist was in Australia the month you remember seeing them in Hamburg, you have the wrong year — that elimination is usually more useful than a confirmation.

An artist's page on Gigvault lists their shows by date with venue and city, which makes the routing visible at a glance: you scan the year, find the leg that passed through your region, and there's your candidate show. Iron Maiden's page is the clearest example — 64 shows in 51 cities, so a European leg and a North American leg are visibly separate blocks — and Journey's, with 45 shows in 44 cities, reads the same way. That's the difference between guessing and reading it off.

When the artist has toured under different names

Solo projects, reunions, "band featuring original member" constellations. If you can't find the tour under the name you remember, the show may be filed under the other project.

The giveaway is the setlist: if the night mixed both projects' songs, it was probably billed under the newer name. Reconstructing what was played is its own topic — covered in the apps that track live show setlists — but as a dating tool, one confirmed song can identify the tour, and the tour identifies the leg.

The venue remembers what you don't

If you know where you saw them but not when, invert the search: go through the venue instead of the artist.

Venue histories are ordered by date, and a room only hosts so many shows a year. Scrolling a venue's past shows for a familiar name is often faster than paging through an artist's whole career — especially for support slots, which artist-centric searches miss entirely.

The venues where this works best are the ones with the deepest history logged:

Rock City and the Ritz are the ones to try for a 1980s or 1990s show: between them they hold 219 concerts, and the earliest entries predate almost everything else in the archive. Melkweg has the most shows of any venue, but nothing before 2019 — a lot of nights, all recent.

Small tours are the hard ones — and the worth-it ones

Arena tours are documented to death. The club tour from 2009 with two hundred people a night is a different story: no press, dead links, maybe a poster in someone's photo album.

For those, combine what survives: the album that dates it, the venue's history, other people who were there. This is exactly the case where a shared concert diary earns its keep — if anyone else logged that night, their entry carries the date and venue your memory lost. One other attendee is all it takes.

And when you do pin it down: log it. The tour date you spent twenty minutes reconstructing tonight is the one you won't have to reconstruct again in five years. The full method for getting a whole history in is in how to keep track of concerts you've been to.

Common questions

How do I find out if a band played my city in a specific year?

Work the routing: find any confirmed show from that year, then check whether the leg passed through your region. If the artist's shows are listed by date with cities, you're scanning one page instead of searching the whole internet.

How far back do tour records go?

In Gigvault, to 13 August 1972 — Hawkwind in London. But the archive is heavily weighted to recent years: 13,320 of its 15,204 concerts are from 2020 onwards, and only 310 are from before 2000. Big tours from the 1980s are there in outline; club tours before the mid-2000s are patchy everywhere, not just here.

Which artists have the longest tour history in Gigvault?

Iron Maiden: 64 shows from 1986 to 2026 across 51 cities. Journey has 45 from 1986, Megadeth 67 from 1988, Bon Jovi 21 from 1985, Aerosmith 13 from 1978. In total 118 artists have shows spanning twenty years or more.

What if I remember the show but can't find it anywhere?

It probably was a support slot, a festival set, or a different year than you think. Check the venue's history for the years either side, and check whether the artist was billed under another project name.

Can I see every tour an artist has ever done in one place?

Their Gigvault page lists the shows the archive holds by date with venue and city, and you can mark the nights you were at. For the years the archive is missing, you can add the show yourself — that is how the 1972 Hawkwind date got there.

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