The Aesthetics of Setlists
I don’t usually like to post in such quick succession, but I wanted to share with you all a piece I had a lot of fun writing that just went live recently. It’s on the aesthetics blog Aesthetics for Birds, and it’s about my love-hate relationship with the website Setlist.fm.
It turns out a lot of people haven’t ever heard of the site (much less used it in the problematic way I describe), but I know many who are devoted users (myself included, for better or worse, as you’ll see). In the piece, I try to articulate why the website contributes to some aesthetic problems, though it also has a lot of practical value as well.
Even if you don’t use the site, you might find something of interest in the argument. I try to identify some aesthetic norms of live music performance in the process of showing why things like Setlist.fm compromise the aesthetic experience of live music. So, while Setlist.fm is the application, it’s based on some theoretical ideas that I’m starting to develop here.
Here’s the link to the piece, with an excerpt below:
Setlist.fm has grown to become not just an endless archive for music nerds, but also a predictive tool for determining whether going to a concert is worth going to (or staying at).
What’s so bad about this?
Live music performances tend to present art in a distinctive way: they involve a curated selection of songs, presented in a particular order, with certain narrative and artistic elements. One of those elements is surprise: the audience is presumed not to know what song comes next. Think of the roar of the crowd when the singer announces, “This next one’s called…” or when the guitarist starts in on the song’s opening riff. With the perhaps lone exception of classical music concerts, it is exceedingly rare to ever find an artist or group voluntarily sharing their setlist with the audience prior to the performance. The element of surprise in live music is underappreciated, but it’s absolutely central.
But Setlist.fm encourages us to spoil the surprise for ourselves. And this diminishes our experience. Just like spoilers for TV shows and movies compromise the viewer’s aesthetic experience, so do concert spoilers diminish the concert-goer’s experience. We deprive ourselves of the desirable narrative anticipation that comes with the ignorance of the setlist.
Thanks for reading!
–JVD