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Fri, Mar 29, 2024

Interesting Rush setlist exercise

Mon, Feb 19, 2007@11:20AM | comments removed/disabled

[Rush 2007 setlist exercise]

UDPATE - 2/20@4:25PM: The results are in! Thanks to everybody's help, mtb2112 got over 500 completed surveys to work with. To see all the gory details just scroll down to the bottom of this post and click on the more link. Otherwise, here's the summary:

Camera Eye - 25.59983
Jacob's Ladder - 11.11279
Entre Nous - 7.75004
Available Light - 5.04734
Freeze - 4.38702
Presto - 4.11870
Vapor Trail - 3.60910
Losing It - 3.56062
Cut to the Chase - 3.50728
The Weapon - 2.96026
Marathon - 2.84010
Enemy Within - 2.72391
Digital Man - 2.45450
Grand Designs - 2.25309
Territories - 2.14813
Alien Shore - 2.13037
Mission - 2.04785
Prime Mover - 1.75696
Totem - 1.68465
Chemistry - 1.29707
Grace to Grace - 1.14363
Turn the Page - 1.13075
How It Is - 1.13009
Everyday Glory - 0.96792
Out of the Cradle - 0.64063
Second Nature - 0.49197
Hand Over Fist - 0.46073
High Water - 0.44092
Carve Away the Stone - 0.41654
Promise - 0.18722

Many, many thanks to mtb2112 for putting this together and compiling the results. If you liked this survey you should also check out the online Rush setlist petition.

----- snip -----

Reader mtb2112 sent me this very interesting Rush survey/questionnaire (for lack of a better term). I'll let him do the explaining:

Below is a link to an exercise designed to evaluate the appeal of Rush songs that have never, or rarely, been performed live. This is much more than the usual 'rank your favorite songs' questionnaire.

This is a form of 'Conjoint' or 'MaxDiff' work that introduces trade-
offs into the process. Basically, you'll be presented with multiple
"mini sets" of 6 songs- and you pick the one you'd most like to hear
and the one you'd least like to hear from each set. Everyone who does this exercise will get different combinations/sets.

http://69.25.89.160/HP20/rsh/rushlogn.htm

I set this up because:

- I do this type of research for a living and I wanted a fun way to
gather some data to play with as I'm trying to learn more about this
type of analysis.

- Also because I'm genuinely curious about how these results will pan
out. If I get enough people to do this, I'll post some results. Send
the link to anyone you think is interested and familiar with enough
Rush material to offer real opinions.

There are no restrictions on access-- but for data integrity's sake,
please don't do it more than once. I have a cap of 300 or so total
completes.

More notes, if interested... Due to software and mathematical
limitations, only a total of 30 songs are evaluated. To narrow the
list, I focused on Permanent Waves material and newer.

Thanks!

I'm very interested to see how the results turn out.

UDPATE - 2/20@4:25PM: Here are the results straight from the source:

With over 500 cases, here's how things shake out:

These are listed in order of preference. As mentioned earlier, these scores represent a 'share of 100' scaling; the numbers listed under "Average" sum to a total of 100. It is also "ratio scaled" – meaning that we can say things like Presto (4.12) is ~twice as attractive as Mission (2.05), or that Camera Eye is ~136x more appealing than Promise!

The 95% lower/upper columns are confidence intervals. So if we look at Camera Eye, what the software says is that the best guess at the relative attractiveness/share of 100 is 25.6 –however, we’re 95% sure that the true share is between 22.9 and 28.2.

As the number of completes grew, the top songs really didn’t change too much—but the confidence in the results did grow.

The top 3 positions are pretty clear:

* Camera Eye - 25.59983
* Jacob's Ladder - 11.11279
* Entre Nous - 7.75004

Collectively, we seem to want the older material. Given the apparent throwback sound of the new record, this material may be a good fit. I almost didn't include Camera Eye in this test because the band was said to have rehearsed it for the R30 tour, but just wasn’t into it... My personal opinion is that the song has great moments, but is about 3-4 minutes longer than it needs to be. But I'd still love to hear it. Clearly, this is the dominant song that fans want to recover from "the vault."

From here, we have a trio that scored very well, and would delight most of the survey participants. Statistically, these are somewhat interchangeable in terms of their ranking. Early results (around 75 cases or so) had Freeze at #2. It remained a solid performer as more people took the survey, but slipped to #5. The two often overlooked gems from Presto hung around the top-5 threshold throughout the data collection.

* Available Light - 5.04734
* Freeze - 4.38702
* Presto - 4.11870

The next set finds a glut of (statistically) fairly interchangeable material- mostly 80's era material. All would be well received by a majority of survey participants . There was a definite contingent of "Fear" fans. Many individual respondents had very high scores for The Weapon and Enemy Within.

* Vapor Trail - 3.60910
* Losing It - 3.56062
* Cut to the Chase - 3.50728
* The Weapon - 2.96026
* Marathon - 2.84010
* Enemy Within - 2.72391
* Digital Man - 2.45450

From here- we find that all songs have their fans, but these songs mark the threshold where we can’t say that there is at least some 'universal appeal.' Each of these songs had a few very high scores with individual participants, but collectively didn’t perform as well as the others. Note that Grace to Grace falls in this group. Many liked it, but overall most Rush fans want Rush material.

* Grand Designs - 2.25309
* Territories - 2.14813
* Alien Shore - 2.13037
* Mission - 2.04785
* Prime Mover - 1.75696
* Totem - 1.68465
* Chemistry - 1.29707
* Grace to Grace - 1.14363
* Turn the Page - 1.13075
* How It Is - 1.13009

Finally, there are these songs— *some* songs had to be the least appealing – and here they are. I personally would like Everyday Glory- but I'm obviously in the minority here.

* Everyday Glory - 0.96792
* Out of the Cradle - 0.64063
* Second Nature - 0.49197
* Hand Over Fist - 0.46073
* High Water - 0.44092
* Carve Away the Stone - 0.41654
* Promise - 0.18722

FULL RESULTS:

Rescaled Scores (0 to 100 scaling)

Camera Eye - 25.59983
Jacob's Ladder - 11.11279
Entre Nous - 7.75004
Available Light - 5.04734
Freeze - 4.38702
Presto - 4.11870
Vapor Trail - 3.60910
Losing It - 3.56062
Cut to the Chase - 3.50728
The Weapon - 2.96026
Marathon - 2.84010
Enemy Within - 2.72391
Digital Man - 2.45450
Grand Designs - 2.25309
Territories - 2.14813
Alien Shore - 2.13037
Mission - 2.04785
Prime Mover - 1.75696
Totem - 1.68465
Chemistry - 1.29707
Grace to Grace - 1.14363
Turn the Page - 1.13075
How It Is - 1.13009
Everyday Glory - 0.96792
Out of the Cradle - 0.64063
Second Nature - 0.49197
Hand Over Fist - 0.46073
High Water - 0.44092
Carve Away the Stone - 0.41654
Promise - 0.18722

If you want some really detailed results, I'm sure that the author would be happy to supply them to you.

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