Live music used to be a guessing game. Concert times were posted, but exactly when the headlining performers would take the stage — let alone leave it — was often unclear. Touring artists could be expected to showcase their latest albums, but finding out which older hits they might be dusting off required deep sleuthing. Identifying rarities or covers demanded specialized knowledge.
Enter Setlist.fm. The wikilike site, where users document what songs artists play each night on tour, has grown into a vast archive, updated in real time but also reaching back into the historical annals. From the era of Mozart (seriously!) to last night’s Chappell Roan show, Setlist.fm offers reams of statistics — which songs artists play most often, when they last broke out a particular tune. In recent years, the site has begun posting data about average concert start times and set lengths.
That knowledge, of course, has inevitably changed the live-music experience. Like most internet-age innovations, having easy access to boatloads of information is, as Jay-Z (last full show: April 14, 2023) might say, a gift and a curse.
For some artists, Setlist.fm provides a handy way to be sure they don’t duplicate what they performed on their last trip through a city, or a prompt to keep things fresh for their audiences. For fans, it may serve as a consumer guide to avoid spending lavishly on a gig they may not enjoy, or a way to plan when to grab a beer or how late the babysitter might be needed. To critics, it can also be an example of how the internet has drained mystery out of a thrilling in-person encounter.
Setlist.fm can seem at once ubiquitous and inconspicuous. Few reports about its origins are readily available online. According to Live Nation Entertainment, Setlist.fm’s parent company, the site was founded in 2008 by Molindo, a media agency based in Austria that also developed Songtexte, a German-language site that compiles song lyrics. “They’re giant music fans and big data nerds,” said Joe Fleischer, the publisher of Setlist.fm and head of a Live Nation studio that produces marketing content for major brands.
Live Nation acquired Setlist.fm in 2010, although the entertainment giant did not announce the deal until two years later. Fleischer, a former music journalist, joined in 2011, when Live Nation bought BigChampagne, a music data company he helped found.
The entire point of the site, he said, is being useful: “That’s all it’s ever been, is about increasing utility, increasing our usefulness for fans.”
Lisa Currie, a 56-year-old data analytics specialist who lives in suburban Chicago, has books filled with ticket stubs from virtually all of the hundreds of shows she has attended. Since learning about Setlist.fm around 2017, she has cataloged her personal concert history in the site’s database as a sort of digital backup. “I was always worried, ‘What if I lost these tickets?’” she said.
Show by show, user entry by user entry, Setlist.fm exploded. In 2012, the site had a database of more than 400,000 set lists for 24,000 artists and reached 1.5 million people a month. Now, it has more than 9 million set lists for 400,000 artists, with 80 million users a year, according to Live Nation. Someone creates a new set list every 20 seconds. Fleischer emphasized that people stay on the site for an average of roughly eight minutes: “It’s a really heavily engaged community.”
Fleischer said that Setlist.fm employs about a dozen people for editorial, marketing and engineering. The site began publishing news articles several years ago. Set times arrived in 2021, and Setlist.fm recently added “dark mode,” allowing users to pull up the site without a telltale bright screen.
Interest in blockbuster artists’ set lists has helped draw eyeballs. During Taylor Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour kickoff in Glendale, Ariz., around 700,000 people were refreshing the site, Fleischer said, in what he noted was probably the biggest spike in traffic to date.
Big stadium or arena spectacles like Swift’s require production — moving platforms, lighting cues, wardrobe changes — that doesn’t change, so fans become familiar with the set list on opening night. To keep attendees on their toes and offer something different, acts like Swift, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, Fall Out Boy and the Jonas Brothers have begun integrating so-called “surprise” songs or guests into their sets. When Oasis played to sold-out stadiums this summer, its set lists, heavy with B-sides and album tracks, were widely discussed.
John Darnielle, the singer and guitarist for the Mountain Goats, said that he looks at Setlist.fm almost every night on tour to keep his solo portion of sets fresh. He noted that while the younger version of himself would have cared deeply about audiences not knowing what he was going to play, one website isn’t responsible for changing the nature of concerts — for example, artists today can’t test out a work-in-progress onstage anymore without having it recorded and spread around. “That’s not a Setlist.fm issue,” he said. “That’s an internet issue.”
Setlist.fm’s success has, however, appeared to attract potential skeptics. Roger Daltrey said last year that the availability of set lists online had “ruined” live shows for him. Speaking with Billboard, Daltrey, lead singer and a co-founder of the Who, lamented what he characterized as “no surprises left with concerts these days.” In February, Jack White addressed fans’ apparent demands for longer set times during his latest tour. “There’s no setlist, and it’s not a Marvel movie,” he wrote on Instagram. “It’s rock and roll and it’s a living breathing organism.”
In a statement to The Times, Daltrey clarified that “the age of social media and the internet has changed the ability of any band” to present audiences with the unexpected. He said that in pre-online days, “the power of word of mouth left people more room for imagination, and enjoyment.” Through a spokesperson, White declined to comment.
What about the mystery of the live music experience? Fleischer called it an “existential” issue but said that his team doesn’t receive many complaints about it. “One of the things we hear is, like, we’re good at the bathroom-break planning,” he said. And while Fleischer called Daltrey’s viewpoint “a valid position,” he suggested that if people don’t want to know what has been on the set lists, they can simply look after the show.
Setlist.fm carries advertisements, but that income probably accounted for only a tiny portion of the $896 million in profit its parent company, Live Nation, posted last year. A corporate behemoth, Live Nation is the world’s largest concert promoter and the owner of Ticketmaster. The company does not break out revenue or earnings for Setlist.fm. A Live Nation spokesperson said, “The Setlist.fm core focus is on deepening fan engagement around concerts, which we believe fuels greater interest in the live experience, leading to increased attendance.”
(Live Nation is currently fighting a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, alleging illegal ticket resale tactics, and an antitrust suit filed by the Justice Department that accuses the company of being a monopoly that harms competition and drives up ticket prices for consumers.)
Dozens of volunteer moderators help shepherd users’ Setlist.fm posts into the universe. “I love putting numbers on everything,” said Martin Lefebvre, a 28-year-old government statistician in Paris who has been moderating on Setlist.fm for eight or nine years. He said that he spends around 30 minutes on the site every day, checking lists for errors such as a song title that might be miscapitalized. “Why I do this is because I want the site to be perfect,” he said.
The type of meticulous tracking that Setlist.fm cultivates has long been familiar to devotees of the Grateful Dead, Phish and like-minded jam bands. Publications such as the pre-internet DeadBase and noncommercial, fan-run websites like Phish.net collected set lists for their groups for decades.
Aaron Stein, a 51-year-old Brooklyn nanoscientist who started the NYC-Freaks email list, a forum in which around 1,000 concertgoers exchange hundreds of emails a day, said that he has a spreadsheet of every concert he has attended going back three decades. He praised Setlist.fm for making available to fans of any artist the kind of information that once might have been limited to the likes of die-hard Dead fans.
“It’s become one of those resources that you almost take for granted,” he said. The addition of set times, he added, was “a big deal.”
Stein expressed a nuanced view of the effect of published set lists on the live mystique, arguing that documenting a concert after it’s over can extend the communal experience. “It does take some of the magic out, but it adds a different kind of magic,” he said. “What’s wrong with things changing over time?”
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a jammy band from Australia, aims to play constantly evolving set lists. Its singer and multi-instrumentalist Stu Mackenzie said that while an ad-free, Gizzard-specific website — KGLW.net — also posts set lists, Setlist.fm makes this daunting-seeming task much easier. “It’s genuinely very, very helpful,” Mackenzie said. “What blows my mind is that we’re doing a show and then by the time we get offstage, generally our set lists are on there.”
The list of artists who use the site is not limited to the jam-adjacent. Mac McCaughan, the singer and guitarist for the indie band Superchunk, said he uses Setlist.fm to avoid too much overlap with the group’s previous set in a city: “It’s a super useful resource for me that way.”
Stuart Braithwaite, the guitarist for the mostly instrumental Scottish band Mogwai, said he has embraced Setlist.fm since a Mogwai-specific site went on hiatus. “I like the idea that it probably shames bands from playing the same set every night, which I think is the height of laziness,” he said.
Braithwaite uses the site as a fan, too. “A couple of years ago, I went to see a lot of Cure shows,” he said, “and I’d just check it every day and see what songs they played, like a total dork.” He brushed off concerns that Setlist.fm might take away the element of surprise. “It spreads the experience out from just the single night that the concert takes place.”
Ella Shipman, 20, a junior at Emerson College, said she’s a “huge fan of Taylor Swift and Setlist.fm” who has used the site to preview upcoming shows. “I want to know what songs I’m going to be screaming at the top of my lungs,” she said. Shipman said that while watched the updates on Setlist.fm for surprise songs from Swift’s Eras Tour, along with live video streams on apps like TikTok and Instagram.
“You didn’t have to be in the stadium to know what was going on.”
The post The Website Reshaping Live Music, One Set List at a Time appeared first on New York Times.
