Every band has obsessively dedicated fans, but it takes a special sort of fan with a serious passion for statistics to put together something as ridiculously all-encompassing as this together, a massive road-map through every song the band has ever played live.
Which song has been played the most? Which have barely been played at all? Which album gets the most love, and where are they most likely to play live? Thanks to data journalist Deniz Cem Önduygu and his extensive report (powered by data from aggregate sites Setlist.fm and Last.fm) you can find all this out and more.
He even gives us normalised ‘power rankings’ that take into account each song’s age vs its play count to give us a better comparison of how much the band actually like playing each song live. So while ‘Enter Sandman’ is only their 6th most-played overall, when it all gets balanced out by ‘power’, it takes the number one spot handily from ‘Master Of Puppets’, which drops down to their fourth favourite.
Considering it’s based on the best available data sets and can’t possibly cover every single gig and track they’ve ever played, there will probably be a couple of nitpicks for fans who’ve seen some particularly obscure gigs, so take it more as a pretty accurate representation rather than 100% gospel.
Also, the exercise only covers a 30-year span from 1982 to 2012, so we can’t tell how much Hardwired… To Self-Destruct they’ve been giving us, but it’s pretty impressive stuff, and a Metallica fan can spend a good amount of time poring over the chart below to discover little bits of trivia. Go nuts!
Credit: Deniz Cem Önduygu
