Quartz reports that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has stated that Metallica shapes its concert setlists based on the data from his service, saying:
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“You have an artist like Metallica, who changes their setlist on a city-by-city basis just by looking at Spotify data to see, which the most popular songs happened to be in that city.
“We’ve never before been at a place in time where you could make as many informed decisions and understand your audience as well as we can do now as an artist.”
Back in 2017, drummer Lars Ulrich said on how he creates the band’s live setlists:
“I’ll sit and look at last couple times we played [in the area] – whatever city we’re in, I’ll look at the last 10 years worth of shows from that particular city. Obviously, there’s certain songs we ‘have’ to play, but then there’s the deeper cuts – and the deeper cuts I always try to vary.
“So if we played ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ the last time, maybe I’ll put ‘Through the Never’ or ‘Breadfan’ or whatever. I try to vary six or eight of the deeper songs so you give fans a different setlist and a different experience.
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“Since I started doing that, it correlates with when we started taping all our shows and we offer them for sale on something called LiveMetallica.com, mixed by the same team that mixes our albums. Since we started doing that in ’03 or ’04, we haven’t played the same setlist twice.”