3.0 By Album

Thursday 11/29/2012 by TheEmu

I was thinking about how little play Undermind and Round Room have gotten in 3.0, and I got curious to see how the different albums rank out. Most of this is expected (Originals not on studio albums and cover songs are far and away the top two spots) and some, though perhaps not surprising, seem interesting to me (Joy takes the top spot among studio albums by a quite a bit). In any case, here are the numbers, delivered in the form of a blog entry to justify the hour or so I spent doing it.

Songs appearing on Junta that were also on The White Tape were only counted for Junta. "Slave" was counted as part of The White Tape, which obviously changes the scoring for that album significantly.

1. Originals - No Studio Album 730 (18.93%)

2. Covers 678 (17.58%)

3. Joy 302 ( 7.83%)

4. Picture of Nectar 271 (7.03%)

5. Farmhouse 259 (6.72%)

6. Junta 250 (6.48%)

7. Hoist 227 (5.89%)

8. Lawn Boy 226 (5.86%)

9. Rift 211 (5.47%)

10. Story of the Ghost 203 (5.26%)

11. Billy Breathes 195 (5.06%)

12. Round Room 75 (1.94%)

13. Party Time 65 (1.69%)

14. The White Tape 58 (1.50%)

15. Undermind 56 (1.45%)

16. Trey Songs 32 (0.83%)

17. Mike Songs 11 (0.29%)

18. Page Songs 8 (0.21%)

19. The Siket Disc 7 (0.18%)

20. Dude of Life Songs 1 (0.03%)

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26 comments - Link: http://phi.sh/b/50b73014

Comments

2012-11-29 5:34 am, comment by funkbeard

We need more Halfway to the Moons.

Since Page mastered that tune in Sept. 2011 at Dick's, I hope they play it at every tour stop. Page, play your fucking songs! You are a great writer/composer. I really feel the material you bring, and it saddens me that you give more attention to your covers than to your brilliant originals. Damn fine songs, man. And that Half the Way to the Moon.... You turned that baby into a masterpiece, and then didn't play it in 2012!!!! One the 200+ song tour where Shaggy Dog was played and Halfway to the Moon was ignored.... fuck man. Page, it's ok to play your songs. Not every performance has to be perfect and special. But you write good music, and I'd be stoked if you played 2 in a row some nights, as Mike has been stepping up to offer.

Humility is not an act of ignoring your work, as it might be polite to let someone else sing, or send the royalty check over to Elton John or some other schmoozeball. Humility is allowing yourself to be humiliated a little to offer up the best of what you got. And Page, you write damn great songs! Let's hear them every night! Just do it. We love you, man. 30 years, we've been following. You're a virtuoso now, and your songs are meaningful and great. Let em sing!

Score: 15

2012-11-29 7:42 am, comment by ZapRowsdower

Somebody get me a bar graph!

Score: 7

2012-11-29 7:43 am, comment by ZapRowsdower

Nice work @TheEmu

Score: 1

2012-11-29 8:41 am, comment by tbarney

Nice work! Now we just need @thebarnpresents to make a info graphic.

Score: 1

2012-11-29 8:56 am, comment by TheEmu

Ask an ye shall receive.

Score: 25

2012-11-29 9:59 am, comment by musikface

Why is Rift so low?

Score: 0

2012-11-29 10:45 am, comment by drshaws

Agreed - nice work @TheEmu. I always forget about Farmhouse containing pop versions of jam vehicles.

I second "More Page Songs". Felt privileged to get the Beauty of a Broken Heart at Worcester. Great tune.

Score: 1

2012-11-29 10:46 am, comment by flatbottomfrank

would have expected rift, hoist, junta, ghost and farmhouse to be above all 2.0-3.0 albums. Being that they are better and usually bigger fan favorites.

Score: 0

2012-11-29 12:10 pm, comment by Wilson420

Round Room has some great songs. I think it gets lost in the shuffle and needs to be brought back in.

Score: 2

2012-11-29 1:36 pm, comment by Just_Ivy

I only started seeing shows in 3.0 and have been lucky to catch 40 since my first on 6/25/10. The most surprising thing to me is that I've seen everything on The White Tape that's ever been performed live before (I barfed up a whole nerdy binge-post on the forum...like you all want to x-ray my Phish innards).

Is it a renaissance of sorts? "Everything old is new again", perhaps? The under-representation of songs Round Room and Undermind is probably due to the simple fact that they didn't have as much time together with that material prior to the break-up as they did with everything previous. Meanwhile, songs from The White Tape are probably seared into the boys' cerebella. And playing music that just gels instantly must be super-fun for them.

Sure I'd like to hear some more 2.0 material in the rotation. When and if they feel ready to really approach that stuff, I trust they will.

I've always got a bucket handy to carry my face back to the lot after the show...

Score: 3

2012-11-29 1:37 pm, comment by fluff_hen

Thanks, this is really interesting. As a new fan, I'm often struck looking at mid- and late-90s setlists how they are virtually identical to today's, minus a few Joy songs here and there. I'm glad Phish doesn't just retire the old greats the way the GD tended to do, but I do wish they would mix it up a little more. There is so much great material on Round Room and Undermind...

Score: 0

2012-11-29 2:46 pm, comment by PersnicketyJim

Round Room and Undermind do represent dark periods that still might be difficult for some to revisit.

Also I love that after all these years they're still (almost) a cover band at heart—that's another stat I'd like to see: per cent covers by year.

Score: 0

2012-11-29 3:05 pm, comment by Electrolux

are Party Time tracks counted as "no album" or "Joy"??

Amazing work... next step is to plot the last couple of years with the same data points, and look for trends in song play over the course of multiple tours.... lol

its amazing how much scientific theory we can apply to four awesome dudes playing music, really cool to see the song count like that...

Score: 1

2012-11-29 4:09 pm, comment by uctweezer

Does the 2.0 stuff get lost because of the bad memories it conjures for Trey? I fucking love WotC, Waves, S&SS, ASIHtOS, P&M, -7, 46 Days, and the 3.0 unveiled jam vehicle, Undermind. MOAR of teh 2.0 songZ!

Score: 0

2012-11-29 4:20 pm, comment by nichobert

I mean.. They've Played and clearly been inspired by a bunch of 2.0 songs. Considering some of the stories flying around late 98-2000 and the fact that nobody in the band died in 03-04, I'm always going to view everything after Summer 98 and before Hampton 09 as part of its own curve in the continuum.

There's 8 legitimate improv monsters in those 2 albums, 9 if you count Round Room as anyone who has heard the Vegas or Gorge versions should.

For awhile it seemed like they felt they were slipping medicine in with the applesauce when they played 2.0 songs, but at a certain point they may have realized that there are 30 year old fans out there who were still in college during the 2.0 era and that these songs have plenty of history to people who started seeing the band in the late90s or 03-04.

I'd rather see Round Room than whatever creaky song they haven't played since 88 any day

Score: 1

2012-11-29 7:44 pm, comment by TheEmu

@Electrolux said:

are Party Time tracks counted as "no album" or "Joy"??

Amazing work... next step is to plot the last couple of years with the same data points, and look for trends in song play over the course of multiple tours.... lol

its amazing how much scientific theory we can apply to four awesome dudes playing music, really cool to see the song count like that...

Party Time tracks were counted as Party Time.

I may try to tackle the covers thing...I think it would actually be pretty easy, and it's a slow time at work.

Score: 0

2012-11-29 8:20 pm, comment by toddvoss

I would love to attend a "theme" show that was all of Round Room +Undermind(song)+ The Connection+Scents and Subtle Sounds+ ASIHTOS+Steam.

Now back to my alternate universe of Cat Power.

Score: 2

2012-11-30 12:55 am, comment by tvlxql9x

Cool to see Picture of Nectar near the top, definitely my favorite album from the boys as a whole. Like a few of you folks before me I wish Rift would have made it higher, and I bet a significant portion of those tunes were all Maze. C'mon guys give us more of It's Ice/Mound/MFMF already!

Score: 0

2012-11-30 8:26 am, comment by dscott

It obviously makes sense that the most current material (Joy) gets slightly more play. Even considering all the plausible explanations, it's striking that Round Room and Undermind are such outliers. All the other "real" albums are in the 5-8% range, and those two are less than 2%.

Score: 0

2012-11-30 10:51 am, comment by MiguelSanchez

Hmm, I would've thought that Julius and dwd would carry hoist a little further up the list

Score: 0

2012-11-30 1:12 pm, comment by uctweezer

@nichobert said:

but at a certain point they may have realized that there are 30 year old fans out there who were still in college during the 2.0 era and that these songs have plenty of history to people who started seeing the band in the late90s or 03-04.

You've hit it on the head. My first show was in '99 and I saw them as much as I could in '03 - '04 (which wasn't _that_ much, but ~8 shows), so when they went on hiatus it was like they were frozen in time for me. By the time 3.0 came around, they'd been on hiatus as long as I'd been seeing them (5 years apiece), so those 2.0 songs really stick in my mind. And they were jamming the shit out of them! As I mentioned earlier, I wonder if the (ostensibly bad) memories from that era have led to the reluctance in a sort of guilty-by-association deal.

Score: 0

2012-11-30 3:38 pm, comment by hamburger_helper

It would be cool if these numbers could be normalized by the sample size - ie cover songs are a huge percent, but how does the number of covers played divided by the number of songs in that pool compare to something like the number of songs from the siket disk played divided by the number of songs on the siket disk... I would be curious to see those numbers, I think it would be a somewhat more accurate representation about popularity and trending.

Score: 0

2012-12-01 4:40 am, comment by TheEmu

@hamburger_helper said:

It would be cool if these numbers could be normalized by the sample size - ie cover songs are a huge percent, but how does the number of covers played divided by the number of songs in that pool compare to something like the number of songs from the siket disk played divided by the number of songs on the siket disk... I would be curious to see those numbers, I think it would be a somewhat more accurate representation about popularity and trending.

So, I think this is what you were getting at. It does normalize things, to some extent.

One point made by @Just_Ivy as I was putting this together was that, if you look at any album for a year or two after it first comes out, it will probably have a spike in plays, then level off. Hence the gigantic lead for Joy.

This graph plots number of total plays for each album divided by number of songs for each.

Score: 0

2012-12-01 5:05 am, comment by TheEmu

Actually, this might be the truest representation. This graph applies the ratios in the previous graph (total plays / # of unique songs) back to the total number of plays, essentially weighting the total number of plays based on the number of unique songs in each group. I think this is more what you were getting at, @hamburger_helper, and may be the most accurate way to look at it.

At least I think. I've always sucked at math and never took statistics.

Score: 0

2012-12-03 1:28 am, comment by hamburger_helper

Awesome, and really interesting to see the different aspects of this. Thanks for doing the legwork @TheEmu!

Score: 1

2012-12-03 11:04 am, comment by dick_tatertot

So if we call # times songs played per album / # songs on an album X . . .

You took the total songs played and divided by X? I think the 2nd graph that just shows X is the most accurate and if anything you should be taking X and dividing it by total.

Like if you were doing this with a statistic to look at which baseball team had the most hits by lefties, you'd just take the total hits by lefties per team and divide by # lefties on the team. To see the % of hits by lefties per team, then you'd take that number and divide hit by the total hits by lefties in the league, but not the other way around. Sorry to get pedantic, but I find this stuff more interesting to think about than my job!

Score: 1