How this is worked out
The number beside a song is how many shows the band played between this performance and the one before it. A gap of 0 means they played it again the very next night; 485 means four hundred and eighty-five shows went by. The figure comes from Phish.net, which computes it; nothing here is counted a second time.
Under each gap is that song's usual one — the median of its gaps over the ten years before the show, not over all of history. Forty years of a working band is several different bands. The 1990s dominate any all-time figure, when they played far more shows a year out of a smaller catalogue, so all-time gaps run much shorter and better than half of everything came out overdue — a word that means nothing if it fits three songs in five.
Counting a fixed number of past performances instead does not fix it: twenty performances is two years for a staple and twenty-four for a rarity. Kung's last twenty reach back to 1995. Bounding by time instead means a song has to have been in rotation lately to be judged at all.
The median rather than the average, because gap distributions are savagely right-skewed: a staple with a median of 6 carries a handful of 200s, and an average over that would call almost anything ordinary.
A gap outside the middle 70% of that ten-year window gets called. Below it, premature; above it, overdue; inside, nothing is said, which is most songs. The band's ends are interpolated values that appear nowhere in the song's actual gaps, which is why they are not printed as numbers.
Quartiles were tried first and called 37% of songs overdue. The middle 70% yields roughly 13% premature, 67% expected and 20% overdue.
A song page shows what each performance sat between. A plain ← or → means only that: the song before it, the song after it, played as separate songs with a stop between them.
Where phish.net recorded that the band ran two songs together, its own mark appears in place of the arrow — > or –> — and it sits between the two songs it joins, the way it does in a written setlist. So an arrow is the absence of a segue rather than the presence of anything, which is worth saying because the two look equally deliberate on the page.
The bar is a position, not a length. Its shaded middle is the band above — where this song usually lands — the hairline through it is the median, and the mark is the performance being reported. Left of the shading is sooner than usual for that song, right of it is later. Past three times the upper edge the mark stops at the end and stays there, because beyond a point “very late” is the whole of the message.
Every row is drawn against its own song, which is the reason it works. Earlier the bar was a fraction of the longest gap in the show, and one bustout would take the scale with it: on 168 of 690 shows the longest gap is at least twenty times the median, so about 95% of that night's bars collapsed into an identical stub two pixels long. A scale a single row can destroy for every other row is not a scale. Magnitude was also the one thing that did not need drawing, since the number is printed beside it — what the number cannot say is whether it was early or late for this song.
A song with fewer than eight performances in the ten-year window has no band to be measured against, so its track is drawn empty rather than implying a comparison that was never made.
A report says where the night sits inside its era — the 312th show of 3.0 — and never where it sits overall. There is no honest overall number to give. phish.net offers three defensible totals for how many shows the band has played: 2,239 entries listed, 2,114 that count toward statistics, and 2,106 distinct dates among those. They differ by soundchecks, television and radio sessions, cancelled dates, and nights when two separate shows were played.
The disagreement reaches the beginning. 1983-10-30, the show generally called Phish's first, is one phish.net excludes from statistics, so a count built on that flag declares the second show to be number one and every figure after it inherits the error.
Inside an era the count is exact for three of the four. Six dates carry more than one counting show, and all six fall in 1.0 — the earliest being 1985-02-25, close enough to the start that the drift is not confined to six shows but is inherited by every show after them, roughly 1,350 of 1,361. 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 run one show to a date throughout, so their ordinals are counted rather than estimated. 1.0 shows carry no ordinal, which is a decision and not an oversight: the number could be produced, and it would be wrong by somewhere between one and eight with no way to tell which from the date alone.
A song needs eight performances inside that ten-year window before any of this is said about it. Below that there is no current norm to be early or late against, so it gets its numbers and no adjective. Roughly one song in eleven falls here, which is the honest answer for something the band has nearly stopped playing.
A gap of 100 or more is a bustout regardless of everything above. A hundred sits where Phish.net's own setlist notes use the word. The gap alone decides it: a gap counts shows, so a large one already proves the song has been in the catalogue a long while — nothing newly written can reach the threshold.
Version scores and the Phish.net show rating both come by way of fouldomain, which is the only place the latter is exposed programmatically. Scores are computed from a mix of community signal and audio analysis, so a version has none until a recording of it circulates — days or weeks after the show, sometimes never. Jam chart entries are Phish.net's own, written months after the fact. Both are treated as optional everywhere they appear, which is why a report published the morning after a show carries neither.
Nothing in the data says whether a setlist is finished. There is no show time to reason from, and the format is not promised — a rained-out show can stop mid-second-set with no encore, so counting sets proves nothing. Stability stands in for completeness instead: once a song count has not moved for two hours it is taken for the whole show. Until then the report is held back, because a half-entered setlist would publish wrong totals.