17 February 2012 2 Comments

Some Metallica Setlist Analysis using Tableau Public Visualization Software and some Python Hacking

UPDATE: To see the visualizations properly, please go to this MetallicAnalysis Page, my blog "post" template is way too narrow and fixed for it to look halfway decent.

I've been fucking around with Tableau for a few nights, and I must say that even the free "Public" version is damned impressive, and I've used a LOT of reporting / business intelligence tools, hell, I pretty much make 80% of my living building solutions around that exact business need.

The question was - what kind of data do I use to give it a proper test drive...

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge Metallica fan, hell for as long as I can remember, that's just been "one of my things" (as many current, ex-girlfriends, and ex-wives can attest to)

so, to make a ling story short, I ended up writing a python script to scrape all the setlist data off of the official site (with the easy-peazy scrapemark module and pymssql), clean it up a bit, another python script to geocode all the shitty venue / location data, inserted it into a local SQL Server database and viola.

Is it ground breaking? No.
Is Lars going to call me and praise my analysis? No.
Is anyone even going to give a shit at all? Probably not.

But, hey, it was a fun little exercise. Hell, I might even be adding song and show lengths to it in the future - I'd be amused with a metric that says that James Hetfield has spent 1.25 years of his life on stage singing Master of Puppets.
(UPDATE: It only turns out to be 8.3 days straight playing Puppets. Fuck)

I'll probably post the Python scraping scripts I used in the next few days. They might be of some help to someone - I know I get lots of hits from people using my use a Python script as a windows service post.

UPDATE: I'm too lazy to fix my theme to make this fully visible (aka, it looks like shit), so I'm going to post it on a seperate page here.

I've take out the embedding since this data has its own set of pages on this site now. See above "MetallicAnalysis".

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  • Snoop

    Last Caress/ Green hell has been played. i know beacuse they played in East Rutherford in the fall of 2004.

    • Ry

      Ah, Good call, I’ll have to figure a way around that. The “official” setlists sometimes list it as “Last Caress / Green Hell” as one song and sometimes splits them up into seperate tracks – making it a pain to match.

      So maybe I’ll just hide “Last Caress / Green Hell” from never played since both of those songs have def been played before (just not as technically one song, as far as the site is concerned..)

      Anyways, cheers man, thanks!