One of the things my wife and I love is the live music scene. Most weekends we can hear live music at our pizza shop, at neighborhood bars, at a food-truck fair, and so on. These are almost always cover artists, though they may play a song or two of their own as well. I’ve always wondered about the songs that they choose to cover. One Saturday we heard two bands, one at lunch and one at dinner, with very different styles, but both covered “Wonderwall.” Another day we walked by a band while shopping and then that night heard another band; in that case, both covered “Wagon Wheel.”

While ASCAP collects royalties from bars and restaurants that play live music, small venues don’t need to track the set lists performed. And ASCAP’s music surveys mostly focus on radio and TV. So I wanted to ask people what songs they’d heard performed by a cover artist recently.

Frequency of Live Music Encounters

Just over a third of U.S. adults (35%) had seen a local performer within the past three months. Breaking this down:

  • 18% saw live local music in the past month
  • 17% within two or three months
  • 10% within the past four to six months
  • 16% within the past seven to twelve months.

However, a significant portion of Americans are disconnected from live music experiences, with 29% reporting their last encounter as “long ago” and 10% having never seen local live music. We didn’t ask those who answered “long ago” the songs they heard and many of those we did ask said they couldn’t remember.

What’s Being Played

The 1990s is the musical decade that leads the pack, with 36% of performances featuring music from this era, followed by hits from the 1980s at 32%. A quarter of performances include songs from the 2020s. The song choices vary significantly depending on who is in the audience:

  • Baby Boomers report hearing more 1970s (39%) and 1980s (41%) music
  • Gen Xers hear a heavy rotation of 1980s (45%) and 1990s (41%) hits
  • Millennials encounter more 1990s (45%) material
  • Gen Z reports the most contemporary mix, hearing music from the 200Xs (51%), 2010s (41%), and 2020s (41%).

The Setlist Deep Dive

When asked about specific songs they remembered, audiences reported a mix of classics and contemporary hits. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” tied for the most-mentioned specific songs, followed by Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Other common crowd-pleasers include:

  • “Brown Eyed Girl”
  • “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”
  • “Dreams”
  • “Free Bird”
  • “Margaritaville”
  • “Take It Easy.”

Among artists, The Beatles lead mentions, suggesting their enduring influence on live performers’ repertoires. Of contemporary artists, Taylor Swift was the most mentioned.

These results are from an online newsmaker survey of 1,023 U.S. adults that was fielded by Researchscape International from October 25 to 27, 2024. The data was weighted to the U.S. population by 10 demographic questions. The credibility interval for questions answered by all respondents is ±4 percentage points.

More on the survey:

Photo credit: Charlotte Campbell by Fong Yau Shing Photography.