[We'd like to thank regular blog contributor @paulj for contributing another insightful data visualization to the blog. ICYMI: his pre-Dick's piece. - ed.]
He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. -- Proverbs 10:4
Note #1: “Idle Days” is the number of days from the last pre-Dick’s show to the first night of Dick’s. In 2019, it was 47 days from Alpine N3 to Dick’s N1.
Note #2: The average three-night rating for 2019 is based on about 425 reviewers for each show. The value used in this graph (3.967) is likely to change a bit as more people provide a rating.
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Aside from slight anomalies, this would be the expected result, i.e. more lag between performances means lower rated performances due to rust/cobwebs, etc...
Great Stuff!
p.s. i rated Saturday & Sunday a 5 and i was in attendance and particularly sober aside from some slight heat exhaustion...LOL
At first glance, I thought this one had @ucpete's name written all over it.
Musically speaking, 2019 may not have been my favorite Dick's run, but the jamming was super solid throughout the weekend. Phish did their job well, although they didn't match the heights of previous years. That said, it's Phish@Dick's, so we got to stay with friends for the weekend, catch up with the Lot G Kansas/Iowa/Colorado crew we pre-game with every year, and I managed to talk a (nice) Adams City police officer out of busting me for public urination in Lot H. So, all in all, A GREAT RUN!
People arent rating shows based on any clear or agreed upon criterea. Some people give 1 star ratings just to bring down the ratings of shows that they think are rated too highly.
I think it would be interesting to see the data with all of the 1 and 2 star ratings removed.
The show ratings are also based on averaging integers. Can we really say that there are FOUR significant figures in an average of integer values? Every single one of these shows is essentially rated 4 stars except 2012 which you could argue is rated 5 because the band conciously decided to do something with special significance to fans in that year.
An argument could be made for three tiers, but the bottom tier is distributed all across the x axis.
As it is, even the longest gap by far does not result in a sgnificantly lower rating, it isnt even the worst rated show. The third longest gap is the 4th highest rating!
Here is a comparison of all 2018 and 2019 shows, and the # of days between the last show played. I see two things.
1. There seems to be a correlation between higher day gaps and lower ratings
2. However, It's also very common for low rated shows to occur in low day gaps, and the variances to be larger.
If you plot the same shows by date (like below) it's still inconclusive to say that the show ratings trend higher as more shows accrue in a short period of time.
An interesting analysis (but not one that can be done based on available data), would be to do the same analysis based # of mistakes made by the band during songs (instead of reviews which are too subjective). I bet you would see less mistakes as the tour went on.
Such a long layoff opens up almost all songs, which then I think they tend to "lean" on their strongest ones which is why it doesn't rate as high. There were also a lot of new songs this year since last Dicks that they wanted to showcase, which isn't what some people want to hear. Also, the graph makes 2019 appear low, but rating close to a 4 is still solid imo.
I do think them playing together closer to the shows helps and I am all for a 2-leg run of June and August again or something similar where Dicks really is the summer tour closer and not a one-off.
That being said I agree with the users who say this theory does not offer a whole lot of explanatory power in terms of show ratings. If we want to get economics-y with our analysis of Phish shows then we have to take it all the way. The R-squared here is probably about 0.6. Plus any power analysis where we only have 9 observations would not merit much causal interpretation. With all the data we collect as phish fans, a much more robust analysis could likely be performed on this theory. Idk if there is anything specific about Dicks that would make us want to focus ONLY on the stats for those shows. We could test the hypothesis regarding idle days on a broader cohort to try to estimate this more precisely!
2013 IMHO is way under rated. Probably because 2012 Dick’s was peak 3.0. I think we all agree tour openers are a huge risk precisely because of rust. I was at the Mothership for the comeback because I would not be anywhere else on planet earth when Phish is playing after a hiatus such as it was. Have I ever listened to those shows again? Nope , but the love in that round room has yet to be equaled in my experience. Ratings are good and all, but we know shows are a Rorschach test in many ways, Where You At ?
I started seeing Phish in Burlington in ‘87. IMHO 2012 Dicks is the best three day run of 3.0 . Sunday night at Alpine was up there for best show of 3.0 and really a massive surprise for us. Kinda saw that Dicks wouldn’t surpass that with the break . But all my friends had a funky good time.
Your complaints about show ratings are well-founded, and have been discussed in past: attendance bias (+), recency bias (+), downrating to offset attendance and recency bias (-), people using the scale differently (i.e., compressing the scale to only two values, 4 and 5), etc. etc. I've actually got some ideas about how to overcome these problems, and will send you a PM. See below.
@MOO_PHUNK: This post arose from my interest in venue effects, which came from a larger econometric model based on 3.0-era data accounting for # songs/set, bustouts, debuts, vacuum solos, narrations, and a few other things. I'll be updating this model after the 2020 Mexico shows. PM me if you want to see it.
@PHISH21: I don't understand what you are saying; perhaps if I could see the graph I'd get what you're trying to say. PM me for my email address so that you can send the graph.
@DREAMER: it's a standard graph generated by Stata. Minitab, though...that takes me back almost three decades!
To All: I'm thinking of creating a show ratings panel of perhaps fifty respondents for the short fall tour in early December. I'd ask that participants listen to every show at least once, and then rate all seven shows during a specific time period AFTER the Fall tour but BEFORE the NYE run. This should help control for respondent fixed effects and some of the biases inherent in the .net ratings.
Bravo for the thread. And bravo for the band. And I am all about adding additional criterion In order to de-subjectify (made up word) a subject that is entirely fraught with subjectivity.
I love this stuff.
I think @MOMENTSANDSECONDS has got it right. If Phish come to Dick's as a true tour closer, they are more likely to carry the fire than if they allow a couple of weeks or more to pass.
Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if those early 3.0 tours, with two legs, might provide a good comparison...
If this tells us anything it's that this year's run was really underrated or that Friday really dragged it down. (Personally I think the whole tour was underrated; there were a few dud shows but a bunch of huge ones.) Saturday and Sunday were top-notch in all respects, except maybe the hijinks factor, and who cares about that? I can't really figure out what fans like or don't like these days but I thought the plague run was in the upper half of the Dickses.
9/1/17 has a 4.6 rating and 8/31/18 has a 4.5.
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Like where @dryicefactory was going... consider
normalizing on the year. Not certain on best way, maybe y is difference to tour average.
Really enjoyed the thread; keep being cool everyone.