Radio LBB: Top 20 Most Streamed Christmas Songs

If you work in advertising at this time of year, you’re likely to be snowed under with requests for Christmas-related projects. Our composers at A-Mnemonic are often busy working away to produce that signature ‘Christmas sound’ for our clients. My name is Declan Peters, I’m currently interning at A-Mnemonic (whilst studying music at Oxford University) and I’m going to have a very brief attempt here at pinning down how we can quantify the sound of Christmas on a quantitative level.

For the purposes of this analysis, let’s take the top 20 most-streamed Christmas songs of all time (see the playlist below for the full list in descending order) as our dataset.

After working through some mind-numbingly repetitive maths and frying my brain with Christmas music, here are the results:

Most popular key: Tie between A Major and G Major - note that there were no minor keys, only one black-note key (Ab Major, coming up twice) and some songs like ‘Last Christmas’ aren’t particularly clear (perhaps tuned around C half-sharp?)

Average tempo (speed): 117 bpm (interesting fact for any DJs out there – ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ and ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas’ share the exact same bpm)

Average length: 3m39s (some interesting outliers here – ‘Holly Jolly Christmas’ only just scrapes two minutes)

Bonus fact: the top 20 is made up of seven bands/duos and 13 individual artists (of which the split is five female/eight male)

Further studies could look at other features such as instrumentation or rhythm (I did notice an abundance of triplets).

I’m sure this was an almost entirely pointless exercise – but I hope you enjoyed reading anyway. Have a great Christmas.

Source of top streamed Christmas songs can be found here.