Rating your repertoire: find the songs that actually work

Your band has 140 songs on the list and plays about 55 of them. The other 85 sit there because somebody once loved them, and every setlist argument is really a fight about which of those 85 deserve a slot. Nobody has data, so the loudest opinion wins.

Rating the repertoire replaces the argument with 3 numbers per song. It takes one week, and most bands are surprised by what they find.

Three scales, not one

A single "how good is this song?" score hides the reason a song works or does not. Use 3 separate scales, each from 1 to 5:

1. Audience appeal: what happens on the floor when you play it. 5 means people run to the floor or sing along; 1 means people go to the bar.
2. Performance quality: how well the band plays it. 5 means tight, confident, no thinking; 1 means it falls apart every second gig.
3. Enjoyment: how much the person rating likes playing it. Honest, personal, allowed to be selfish.

The scales disagree more than you expect. Sweet Caroline may score 5, 5, 1. The band's favourite deep cut may score 2, 4, 5. That disagreement is the information.

Who rates

Everyone in the band, separately and privately. The leader's opinion of a song's audience appeal is not better than the drummer's, and a public vote in the rehearsal room turns into 3 people agreeing with the singer. Private ratings, then shared results.

Optionally add a fourth voice: the client. A one-line "which songs did you love?" after a wedding, or a planner's note, is a real audience-appeal data point. Weight it accordingly.

Running a rating round

A rating round is a bounded exercise: one list, one deadline, one results sheet.

1. Pick the list. For the first round, the full active repertoire. Later rounds: new songs since the last round, or a category ("all slow songs").
2. Send it out with a deadline. 7 days is plenty; 14 days means people forget. Each person rates every song on all 3 scales. For 140 songs that is about 25 minutes.
3. Collect and average. Per song, per scale, plus the spread (do people agree?). A song with average enjoyment 3.0 where everyone gave 3 is different from one where 2 people gave 5 and 3 gave 1.
4. Meet for 30 minutes, not to re-rate but to decide what to do with the bottom and the top. See band meetings that work.
5. Repeat every 6 months, or after every 25 gigs. Songs change: a well-rehearsed 2/5 performer becomes a 4/5; a 5/5 audience song wears out after 3 years.

Keep the results. Round-over-round trends are the most useful part after year one.

Reading the results

Put the songs in a simple grid: audience appeal across, performance quality down. Four corners:

• High audience, high performance: your core. Protect them, keep them fresh, do not overplay them (more than 80% of gigs is overplaying for most songs).
• High audience, low performance: your most urgent rehearsal list. These are the songs worth the work; a 5/2 becoming a 5/4 changes the set more than any new song. Take 3 per month into rehearsal.
• Low audience, high performance: comfortable but useless on the floor. Useful for background sets and as a dep-friendly filler; not for the peak.
• Low audience, low performance: cut. Now. Nobody will miss them.

Then overlay enjoyment. A song that scores low on audience and performance but 5 on enjoyment for the whole band is a rehearsal-room song, not a gig song. That is fine; it just does not go on the list you send to clients.

When to cut a song

Bands hate cutting. The list feels like an achievement and every song has a defender. Rules that make it painless:

• Any song under 2.5 on audience appeal and under 3 on performance after 2 rounds is cut without discussion.
• Any song not played in 12 months goes to an "archive" list. Not deleted, but not on the client list or the setlist picker.
• Cut in batches, at the round meeting, 5–15 at a time. Cutting one song at a time is 15 separate arguments.
• For every 3 songs cut, add 1 new one. The repertoire should not shrink, it should get denser. See song proposals and votes for the intake side.

The other reason to cut is line-up change. When a singer leaves, their signature songs go to archive until the new singer has claimed or replaced them.

Using ratings in setlists

Once you have numbers, setlist building stops being taste and starts being pacing:

• Peak positions (last 3 songs of each set, the encore) come from the 4.5+ audience list only.
• Openers come from high-performance songs, so the band settles before the audience has decided anything.
• New or shaky songs (performance under 3.5) go in the middle third of set 2, never at a boundary.
• Background sets are where low-audience, high-performance songs earn their keep.

See setlist pacing for the curve to place these on.

Common mistakes

• Rating by memory of the record instead of the last 5 gigs. Ask people to think of the last time the band played it.
• Averaging away the disagreement. A 3.0 average with a 1–5 spread is a song the band needs to talk about, not a mediocre song.
• Skipping the enjoyment scale to be "professional". Bands that only play what the audience wants burn out. Enjoyment is how you keep the line-up.
• Rating only once. The first round is the least accurate; people are calibrating. The second round is where it gets useful.

Do this today

1. Export your active list. If you cannot say which songs are active, that is finding number one.
2. Set up a 3-scale rating sheet and send it to the band with a 7-day deadline.
3. Book a 30-minute meeting for the day after the deadline.
4. Decide the cut rule before the results come in, so it is a rule and not a reaction.

Where expert.band helps

Rating rounds in expert.band do the mechanics: you choose the songs, each member gets a personal link, rates privately on the three scales, and the results chart shows averages and medals for the top songs per scale. The results stay attached to the songs in the repertoire, so when you build the next setlist you can see which songs the floor loves and which ones still need rehearsal.