How long should a 3-hour bar gig setlist be?

The pub books you from nine until midnight. Inside that there are two shapes. Three 45-minute sets with two breaks is the usual one. Four shorter sets with three breaks is the other, and rooms that want the band on and off all night ask for it.

A break is 15 to 20 minutes, and it is always the longer one, because somebody goes outside. Two breaks take 30 to 40 minutes out of your three hours. Three take 45 to 60 minutes.

That is the whole insight and it is just a subtraction nobody does. Budget the long break, because that is the one you take: what your setlist has to fill is 120 to 140 minutes, not 180.

Weddings are the same subtraction with more taken out. You are there five hours and you play about two, because the speeches and the meal are in the middle of it: how long a wedding band plays.

The median song, across the 121 songs we measured, runs 3:53. Divide the music you actually have by that:

• 120 min ÷ 3:5330 songs
• 140 min ÷ 3:5336 songs

Then the gaps. You retune, somebody says something to the room, a guitar gets swapped. This app charges 30 seconds between songs by default, which is about what it takes to get from the end of one song to the start of the next. Over a night this long that is not a rounding error. It turns 30 into 27 and 36 into 31.

Now the number that should frighten you. A band that plans three hours of songs divides 180 by 3:53 and writes down 46 songs. With the gaps in, that is 3h21 of stage time before a single break. It is not a slightly long setlist. It is an extra hour of music that was never going to be played.

None of the above is a target to hit exactly. It is a ceiling, and you want songs past it.

A bar gig is the one place an encore actually happens, because there is no next band waiting to get on. Requests happen too, and at half eleven somebody will ask for something and the right answer is to play it. And you will drop things: a song that is not landing at ten past ten is a song you skip.

So carry four or five past the end of the last set, in an order you have already agreed. Written down they cost nothing. Not written down, the decision gets made on a dark stage by whoever talks first.

• You run long. A pub has a licence, not a preference, and the person fined for it is not you. Getting waved off halfway through the closer is worse than never planning the closer.
• You run out. You finish at twenty past eleven, the room goes to the jukebox, and the landlord is looking at forty minutes of a quiet bar he paid for. This is the one bands underrate, because finishing early feels safe.

The pub is not counting your art at the end of the night. It is counting the till, and a full room at closing time is the entire reason you were booked. Both failures cost you the same thing, which is the rebooking.

If your gig is three 45s, it is the same arithmetic three times, and the per-set version has the gaps worked through in more detail: how many songs fit in a 45-minute set.

And a median is a thin thing to build 27-odd songs on. Of the songs we measured, 22% run over five minutes and 19% come in under three. Over a night this long the mix of long and short moves the total more than the average does, which is the argument in how long the average song is.

Everything above is the median band. You are not the median band, you are the one with a seven-minute closer and two songs the singer stretches.

Setlists.io keeps the breaks separate from the music, so your three-hour target is wall clock while each set is stage time. Paste the list, drop the breaks where they fall, and the number you get is the night rather than the songs. Better to learn it lands at two hours fifty now than at ten to midnight.