How long is the average song?

An average is a poor way to plan a set, because you do not play the average. One song in ten runs under 2:35, and one in ten runs over 5:51. That is a spread of more than three minutes between the short end and the long end of the same setlist.

54% come in under four minutes, which is the number most bands are picturing. But 22% run over five, and those are the ones that quietly eat your slot. Four of them in a row is the difference between finishing clean and being waved off.

And it compounds with the length of the sheet. Say the median runs ten seconds short for your band. Ten seconds off each of the 11 songs in a 45-minute set is under two minutes, which you would never notice. Three sets of that is over five minutes, which is longer than 3:53, so it is a song you do not get to play. A three-hour pub gig is where it stops being academic: how long a 3-hour bar gig setlist should be.

Forty-five minutes divided by 3:53 is 11 songs, before you count a single second of the gaps between them. Add the retuning and the talking and it is fewer.

We wrote about that arithmetic separately, including the part almost nobody counts: how many songs fit in a 45-minute set.

130 titles, hand-picked as songs covers and function bands actually play, looked up against the MusicBrainz recording database. 121 returned a length and those are what the figures above are computed from.

Check two things before you quote it. The list is curated, not a chart. It is a working repertoire, not a sample of all recorded music, and it skews to the rock, soul and country standards bar bands lean on. And the length taken is the best-scoring match for each title, so a live cut or an extended mix can slip in where a studio take belongs. Anything under a minute or over twelve was dropped as an obvious mismatch.

Across 121 songs a few bad matches move a median very little, which is why these are aggregates and there is no list of the longest songs. That list had two wrong records in it, and one wrong record is enough for a musician to stop trusting the rest.

A median is a fact about 121 records. It is not a fact about your set, which holds the songs you chose and the one your singer stretches. Paste your list and Setlists.io gives you the number for those.