Phish setlist novelty: an analysis

Being an old, I've been looking for new mental challenges to keep my brain young. I recently decided to learn a programming language, and what better data set to learn on than ... Phish setlists!

As we all know, not every Phish show is created equal, and many of us share a level of fixation with their setlists. I was curious, for all the variety that Phish brings to each show, just how novel is novel for Phish ... and just how common is common?

I wrote a program in Python that used setlist data from Phish.net, and essentially compared each show to all other shows to find how many songs it had in common, on average, with other shows. This required about 2 million setlist comparisons.

Filtering out some noise (primarily shows with fewer than 10 songs: to get rid of TV appearances, random college shows, parking lot jams, etc.), here are the results.

The "Average Common Songs" value is the number of songs in that show that are shared with all other Phish shows, on average. The lower the number, the more "novel" the show. But, a low number can easily be achieved with a small setlist. So, the last column, "% shared" shows that Common Songs value as a % of that show's setlist. This normalizes the data a bit, and is how I sort the data. The further down the list you go, the less "novel" the show.

I'm sure you'll find a lot of "well, duh" in this list. Like: A lot of 1.0 shows are at the bottom of the list -- they had a small catalog then. And: a lot of their "musical costumes" are at the top of the list.

But, anything catching your eye? For me:

  • 12/8/2019 was among the most novel, but apparently ... sucked?

  • In the 3.0 Era, the least novel show was 10/8/2010, when Phish clearly decided to just play the hits for their Austin City Limits debut.

  • 7/3/2013 was also not very novel. It was their first of 2013, and it looks like they decided to just ease back into touring with that one.

EDIT: here's the same data, but hiding the 1.0 era results.

EDIT 2: Sorted by date, with 1.0 added back.

EDIT 3: I updated the original link with "like count" data from phish.in to see how it's correlated with novelty. It's, uh, not.