In my previous post, I explained my understanding of Tennis’s song “Swimmer.” There, I mentioned that throughout 2023, I listened to Tennis’s album Pollen to the exclusion of just about everything else, and that was not an exaggeration. Apple Music tells me in 2023, I listened to Pollen at least 407 times. That’s 1,543 minutes, or about 26 hours. My next most-listened to album from that year is FM Skyline’s Illuminations at 207 plays.

Then, in 2024, I pushed my love for Tennis a little further. At the end of the year, Apple told me I was a top-500 listener. I have no way of knowing how many people listen to Tennis every year, but I imagine it’s a lot more than 500, so I was kind of proud of myself for “achieving” such a “milestone.” But learning this made me think about what it would take to be a top-100 or a top-10 listener, and I came up with a brilliant idea: I’ll make a playlist of all my favorite Tennis songs and play it on repeat every night in 2025 with my phone on silent. Surely doing that and actually listening to them on a daily basis would put me in the top 10, no?

So, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I won’t lie and say I’ve perfectly followed my plan, but I have, thus far, put on that playlist just about every night before going to bed this year, and of course, I listen to Tennis a lot in my free time and often put that same playlist on repeat for long journeys. I don’t yet know whether this strategy will prove fruitful, but some anecdotal, entirely unscientific evidence suggests it has already bore a little fruit.

If you aren’t aware, Tennis is currently in the middle of a farewell tour. As much as it pains me to say it, Tennis is done making music (as Tennis, at least). Despite having less money than ever, I knew I had to see them for their stop in Indianapolis, the same city where I saw them for the Pollen tour, so I got online and bought my ticket. That show happened last Saturday, on May 24, 2025.

While I have been to more ostentatious or energetic live shows, I loved every second of it and have only one criticism (they didn’t play “Swimmer”). It was an outdoor show at the Hi-Fi Annex in Indy, my first time at the venue and my first time seeing live music outdoors in many years. Though the forecast predicted slightly chilly temperatures for that evening, it ended up being quite warm, which was good because I decided to attend in nothing but a skirt and t-shirt.

Their opener was from their most recent album, Face Down in the Garden, which came as no surprise, and the second was one of the singles from Yours Conditionally, but the third was “No Exit,” from their 2017 EP We Can Die Happy, which came as a huge shock to me. I will never remember everything they played the first time I saw them live, and I know they played songs from throughout the years, despite it being the Pollen tour, but they absolutely did not play anything from an EP. Aside from the song being from one of the band’s smaller projects, the main reason it was shocking is that “No Exit” is the first song on my Tennis playlist. Even more shocking was when they played “How to Forgive,” which I often consider my favorite Tennis song and never expected to see performed live.

Those are just two songs, and this is their farewell tour, so it makes sense they would play some deep cuts, since they can safely assume most of the audience is hardcore fans. However, the majority of the setlist ended up being songs from my playlist. Of the 19 songs played (including the three encore songs), 14 were from my playlist. I’d like to compare these numbers more to their top songs on Apple Music and Spotify respectfully because I’m interested to see how much they differ and whether I could use this information to further my argument, but I think Spotify withholds that information from non-paying users. Alas, I’ll have to make do without, so I’ll conclude this paragraph by saying those 14 songs account for half of my playlist.

If we do a little math, we can get a very rough idea of how many hours my phone has spent with that playlist on repeat. I created and started listening to it on December 31, 2024. It’s been 147 days since December 31. I usually get eight hours of sleep, though I often start the playlist more than an hour before going to sleep and often let it continue playing for about an hour after I wake up, so I’ll round out the number of hours per night to 10. 147 days x 10 hours/day = 1,470 hours. Again, this number is very rough and likely higher, but 1,470 hours translates to a little more than 61 days, meaning I’ve probably spent at least half of the days we’ve had in 2025 “listening” to Tennis.

Artists have access to listener information on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, so they can know things like their most-played songs and what’s popular in specific regions of the country/world. Tennis likely knows which of their songs are most popular in the Midwest, if not Indiana specifically, so they knew which songs the audience at the Hi-Fi last Saturday were likely to be most eager to listen to. Of course, there’s no way to know how they decided their setlist. It’s possible they simply chose the songs they like the most.

Here’s what I will say for now: I will continue my listening habits, and at the end of the year or beginning of the next, I will write another post revealing whether my plan was a success and I made it into the top 10. If it is successful, I’ll have absolutely no choice but to conclude that I did in fact indirectly influence Tennis’s farewell tour setlist.

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