Methodology & sources

The corpus

What the numbers count

• Full-band shows only. Dave & Tim and Dave solo dates are tagged and kept out. The duo plays a different repertoire, and folding those nights in makes songs look overdue that the band may never have played.
• Band dates with no setlist on record are excluded from gap math so they cannot inflate every counter.
• A tease or fake-out is not a play. It appears on the setlist, it counts as pressure on the liberation list, and it does not reset a gap.
• Intros, jams and solo spots stay on setlists and stay out of the rankings.
• Sponsor renames collapse onto one room. Deer Creek, Verizon, Klipsch and Ruoff are one venue. Venues are merged on name plus city, with an explicit reviewed list for rooms the archive files under more than one nearby town — the Gorge appears as both George and Quincy, WA. Rooms that merely share a name are never merged: O2 Arena London and Dublin stay separate, as do HSBC Arena Buffalo and Rio de Janeiro.

Known limits

• The window starts in 1999. The archive does not go back further, so the club years and the Under the Table and Crash tours are missing entirely. A song on the liberation list may well have been played before the window opened — “not in the window” is a much weaker claim than “never played,” and this site does not make the stronger one.
• Aliases are the weak spot. Two published titles for one song split its play count and produce a confident, wrong “overdue” number. If something on a gap list is a song you know they played last week, that is what happened — please report it.
• Duo detection has a floor. The archive labels the act itself only after 2016. Earlier duo dates were identified through show notes and the 1999 acoustic tour leg. A duo date with a clean venue name and no telltale note would not have been caught.
• Tour names are inferred from gaps in the schedule. The archive does not publish them.
• Upcoming dates come from a different page — the official tour listing — and carry no setlist. They are marked scheduled and never touch statistics.

Not published, therefore not shown

The archive publishes dates, venues, setlists, and footnote legends. It does not publish door times, set times, curfews, runtimes, weather, support acts, poster credits, or per-show personnel. Those fields are absent from this site rather than estimated. If that makes a page look thin, the page is being honest.

Editor queue

Contested records are held here rather than being resolved by guesswork.

• 2003-12-12 — Bryce Jordan Center
  Archive note: “Dave And Tim” · 5 of 21 songs marked
  legend says Dave & Tim but does not say which songs. Counted as a band show until someone checks.

Credit

The research culture this depends on was built by fans who counted it by hand for decades — the Almanac-era statisticians, the nancies.org archivists, the tapers, and the people still posting corrections at 2 a.m. because being right matters to them. We do not lift their work and call it a product.

Song and album metadata is checked against MusicBrainz (CC0). Nothing on this site is filled in by guesswork. Trust & legal →