As the year comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on a huge year of live music, (770,561 concerts across the globe huge!). In a time honoured tradition, we pay our greatest admiration and respects to the artists and their teams that have spent the lion’s share of the year on the road, powering through sleepless nights, late visas, lost gear, missed flights and true grit.
With the power of Songkick’s live music database and with more than 7 million events listed in our archive, we’re able to crunch the number of shows that every artist has played this year as well as every show’s venue-to-venue miles, to bring you the hardest working bands of 2018!
Snail Mail hit the road in 2018 at an utterly relentless pace. Sandwiching the release of debut record, Lush, with a fully jam-packed year of shows — we can confidently call Lindsey Jordan’s solo project, Snail Mail, this year’s hardest working band. Clocking up a staggering 155 shows, there was nothing sluggish about the 19-year old’s pace, averaging a show every 2.4 days! The rising star of indie-rock battled a year of gas station food, missing American comforts and tour van naps to lap the earth 4.7 times!
Traversing the earth from his hometown of Nashville the equivalent of 8.99 times, Chris Janson claims the farthest-traveled crown for any artist in 2018. Particularly incredible is that the Buy Me A Boat singer played all of these shows on North American soil. A regular at (and recently inducted member of) the Grand Ole Opry, Janson is a country music star who’s true to his roots, clocking in 24 of his 149 shows in Tennessee. Songkick will definitely buy Chris Janson a boat if that's what it takes to get him to play a show across the pond.
The release of their critically acclaimed debut album, Songs of Praise, at the beginning of the year saw Shame tour their electrifying post-punk show from London to far-reaching points all over the globe. Over their monstrous year, the Brits clocked 150 shows, propelling themselves 166,353 miles — essentially halfway to the moon. Some additional quick and dirty math tells us that also tallies up to about 1572 stage dives, 759 mosh pits and 976 thrown beers.
There was nothing idle about one of England’s most exciting bands’ year on the road. Traveling vast distances to play 140 emotion-fueled modern-punk shows, the quintet shows zero signs of slowing down. Idles is getting ready to kick off the new year with 58 dates on the books, starting their 2019 down under. We’re so excited to follow this band on their rise to the top — not physically follow, we don’t have a team car built for that sort of tour endurance.
