Do you know this site Setlist.fm? It collects all the setlist of bands when they are on tour all over the world, on the condition that fans enter setlists of course. But curiously, they often do. The site is an immense data base, very useful if you want to check what your favorite band played at a given concert, but I have always wanted to do something with it.
There are actually tons of stuff that could be done, but I got this idea when I read somewhere that many veteran bands just release a new album as an excuse to tour the hits. There is only one way to verify it, and Setlist.fm is gonna help.
I wanted to check whether bands which tour an album, effectively play mostly songs of this new album or prefer to play the good old hits. As veteran bands, there is no better example than the Rolling Stones, they have been in the business since the late 60s, and have released an album, ‘GRRR!’ in 2012. To diversify things let’s also pick two bands which appeared in the 70s, Bruce Springsteen and Van Halen, which respectively released ‘High Hopes’ in 2014, and ‘A Different Kind of Truth’ in 2012, and two 80s bands, U2 and Bon Jovi. It was not fair to consider U2’s last effort ‘Songs of Innocence’ (because it was just released a minute ago) so let’s consider their 2009 ‘No Line on the Horizon’, as well as Bon Jovi’s 2013 ‘What About Now’.
Setlist gave me the statistics, the percentage a song of a specific album was played during the tour following the release of the new album, and this included generally a lot of concerts… I compiled the data and got the graph above. But what do we learn? U2 (in red) is the band which promotes the most its latest album without any doubt, whereas the Rolling Stones hardly played their latest effort and were rather stuck in some 60s nostalgia… they surely played all these 60s hits. Springsteen had about the same attitude, to a lesser extent, playing a lot of his mid-70s songs whereas Bon Jovi’s setlists were very well balanced between the past and the present. Van Halen were quite nostalgic but they had reserved a honest part to their last release.
Thus the Rolling Stones and Springsteen really tour for the big old hits and U2 for the new album? Be prepared to hear all these songs of innocence during their upcoming tour.
