Today, I get the opportunity to go to Manchester in order to attend a SlipKnot concert. This is something I am very excited about and as it was all I can think about I decided to write a blog post about it. The website setlist.fm keeps up to date information on setlists played by bands at gigs, this was used as a data source to find information on how many times each song has been performed by SlipKnot, with data having been retrieved on the 15th of January. For the purpose of this study, instrumental solo spots have been removed, non album singles have been attributed to the album which its release date is closest to, songs from demos released before the band were signed to a record label were also removed as data from this era was not well recorded and has been considered incomplete.
Plainly from looking at the data, it can easily be seen which are the most popular songs to perform, displayed in the plot to the left. It is not surprising that the four most played songs are all the the band’s self-titled debut album, as songs have been around for a longer period of time and many of which are considered live staples, meanwhile further down the list some of the more well known songs from later albums such as “The Devil in I”, “Psychosocial” and “Dead Memories” can be seen further down in the top twenty, mixed in with songs from the first three albums.
When looking at total the number of times songs have been performed from each album, a bias towards earlier material in this data becomes even more obvious, hence simply taking the most played songs and trying to use these to predict a set list may not be representative, especially considering that the current tour is in support of the most recent album “We Are Not Your Kind” from 2019, so it would be expected that a lot of this newer material will be performed. In particular, two songs from the new album “Birth of the Cruel” and “Nero Forte” have only been performed once at the time of retrieving this data, and that was the evening before the data was retrieved, so these songs are considerably more likely to be played than the data suggests.
In order to gain more representative data for what a contemporary SlipKnot setlist would look like, the number of plays for each song was divided by the number of years since its release to give the average number of performances per year in order to make the data more fair, the results of which can be seen below. The most performed songs per year are “Unsainted” and “All out life”, which are a song from the most recent album and a standalone single released in the lead up to it, neither of which appeared on the top twenty songs played. Following this are three songs from the first album, showing that there is certainly some bias in the setlist choices towards old fan favourites. The sixth to twentieth spots are now occupied by a relatively even mix of songs from all albums. When looking at the total number of times a song has been played from each album using the modified data there still seems to be a clear preference towards songs from the self-titled debut album, and also a clear dislike towards performing songs from the fourth album “All Hope Is Gone”. Given that past SlipKnot setlists tend to consist of approximately seventeen songs, taking the top seventeen songs (from “All Out Life” to “The Blister Exists”) from the lower left hand figure may give some idea of a likely setlist to play. The results of this predicted setlist will be compared to the actually performed set in my next blog post, to be posted after the concert.
A great post.
[…] predict the set they would play when I went to see them on the 16th of January, which can be found here. The actual set played can be seen to the left below, while the figure to the right below shows how […]