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

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-08-16 · 6 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's how to reconstruct any artist's tour history with what's actually available.

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. For an artist with a long history — Opeth's page is a good example, Radiohead's another — 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.

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?

Big tours: decades, reliably. Club tours before the mid-2000s get patchy, and some are gone from the public record entirely — venue archives and fans' own records are what's left.

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?

For most touring artists, their Gigvault page lists past shows by date with venue and city — that's the tour history laid out in one place, and you can mark the nights you were at.

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