About Guestpectacular
TL;DR I was drunk in a concert talking to a friend about how some bands and their setlists are quite similar between two different concerts, and with the amazing help of LastFM, Setlist.fm, MusicBrainz and Spotify, I created a small app to generate statistics for all the gigs I want to go.
What is Guestpectacular?
Well… this is a long story.
I fell in love with a band I saw in a random party held in that usual apartment full of people that wasn’t invited., The band I saw is called Foals, and the radio was playing their album called Total Life Forever. I'm pretty sure that album was the most played for the entire 2011 in my musical library. My friends can prove it, and I'm pretty sure more than one friend ended up hating it because of it, my apologies.
As a faithful follower of music, I really enjoy to attend to all the concerts that I can. I really do. And as a good friend of mine told me once: “I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted it.”. My story is, all my money goes straight to movies, traveling, and concerts, and the other half… well, I wasted it too.
Ok, ok, I get it. And… what about Foals?
It was 2015. I already had two tickets for two different Foals concerts in México (Foals setlist at José Cuervo Salón in Mexico City, México on May 11, 2011 , Foals setlist at El Plaza Condesa in Mexico City, México on April 22, 2013),. I couldn’t attend to any of them for different little problems in the office. Sad but true.
Oddly enough, the newspapers had actual amazing news. Foals was coming to my city, Guadalajara, México. I had to get my ticket ASAP, right?
A couple of weeks later… the curse falls on me one more time. Yannis Philippakis canceled the shows in Mexico and South America for some medical complications.
Stockholm syndrome v2.0, postmodern's way.
For third time in a row, I wasn’t going to see Foals live. At this time, I started wondering, did I really like Foals so much? Or it's just the fact that I couldn't see them live is pushing me forward to get into their shows? It's the fact that I'm always looking for everything that it's — until a certain point — impossible?
The show goes on. Festival Coordenada 2015 still has other bands… right?
While I was standing in the second slowest line on my entire life for me to get a beer on that infamous concert (the longest one happens the next year, on Festival Coordenada 2016 and I had to wait 38 minutes that time), a very good friend of mine with great optimism was pushing me forward to enjoy the concert with the rest of the bands. And he was right, he's always right. But I was impatient for a beer, plus all the rhetoric about the new headliner Café Tacvba was gonna save the day for me, which probably would be so much better than Foals, drove me off.
And I just couldn't handle it.
Are you still here?
I really appreciate it, and don't get me wrong; Café Tacvba it's a pretty solid band, and I really like it. The first time that I went to their concert, it was freaking great. They have amazing vibes. The second time was good as well. But the third time — yes, I've sung along with Café Tacvba songs several times — feels more like the same. My point is that all their setlist tend to repeat over and over again. They told me that was not the case with them. I said otherwise.
He's a pretty cool dude, and I was also drunk.
“What I really like about math is that they don't have a place for human misunderstanding. I can prove it with statistics. It's all about the math!”
We enjoyed the rest of the concert, as well as that long line for me to get a beer. My god that line was long. So long that I even forgot all about it.
The following week, I didn't have any formal plans and I was trying to learn a new framework. Then I remember my drunkenness and that quote about statistics. So why not? The next couple of hours, I made a small crawler by using all those public third-party services, and I start to fetch all the important data for myself. What am I gonna do with all this data?
It became an internal tool for my friends for a while. I always had new ideas for it. Like, what is the probability of listen your favorite song on the next concert of a band? How many gigs has a band had in Mexico? How many encores is the norm for some bands? What's the maximum number of encores for some bands? And the best one, how different is each setlist between two or more live concerts from your favorite band?
And here I am writing this page to no one, while I'm listening to After Glow, that song from that band that I couldn't see for the third time in a row. A song they haven’t played since Foals setlist at O2 Academy Oxford 2 in Oxford, United Kingdom on February 1, 2014. And while I'm writing this, I have the probability of 15.59% to listen one of my favorite songs on live concert. I'm doing it just for fun. I'll be always always grateful to LastFM, Setlist.fm, MusicBrainz, Spotify and Cloudflare for making this possible.
All the credit goes to those amazing teams and all the people like you updating all the wikis at the end of every concert.
Keep rockin’ fellas!