HOW MANY roads must a man walk down? Analysis of every gig that Bob Dylan has ever played provides no definitive answer. But it does show that he has posed the question to a live audience nearly 1,500 times. Over a 60-year career, the voice of his generation has jingle-jangled his way through about 60,000 songs in 3,400 performances, according to Setlist.fm, a user-maintained website of concert information.

Our charts in this Graphic Detail combine those data with album listings taken from Discogs.com, an online encyclopaedia for vinyl-lovers, to demonstrate how a musician’s live repertoire changes. We have run such analyses for Mr Dylan and 30 other musicians and groups to demonstrate how the contents of their live sets vary over time.

Few have had as varied a track record as Mr Dylan. His early sets consisted almost entirely of covers of songs by other people (denoted by the brown bubbles at the bottom of his chart, above). In 1966 a motorcycling accident stopped him touring, leaving a yawning gap on the timeline. When he converted to Christianity in the late 1970s he abandoned his back catalogue, playing only new God-approved numbers. And since 1988 he has been on a “Never Ending Tour”, playing at least 70 times a year. Today he rarely dusts off anything from the middle of his oeuvre, with the entirely justifiable exception of songs from “Blood on the Tracks”. His last three albums have been made up entirely of covers—bringing him back in the recording studio to where he started on stage.

The chart below also depicts the careers of 30 other artists spanning a wide array of periods and genres, from David Bowie to Beyoncé. While the charts show data from all gigs, they list in the main only those albums which contain three or more original compositions later played live (though some exceptions have been made). Songs that were released on minor albums, singles, or indeed, never released at all—though sometimes bootlegged) are labelled as “Other recordings”.

The data contain plenty of hidden gems. For instance, “Stairway to Heaven” is not even in the top three most-played tracks on Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album. More than 20 years passed before a Beatle performed anything from “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” at a major concert. And Whitney Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is the highest-selling single of all time by a female artist, but ranks only sixth on her list of most-played songs. If the numbers contain one overriding message, it is the enduring nature of the album format. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Kanye West—to name just a few—all rely heavily on thematic studio albums—and tour them extensively, too. Ageing rockers feared that the format might be dead, but it seems today’s young troubadours just can’t shake it off.