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Writer's pictureMatt Seabridge

🎄 When Do We Start Listening To Christmas Songs? 🎄

🤶🎄🎅




Do you really work in a British office if you haven't heard someone ask "when do we start listening to Christmas songs" in November?


When is it socially acceptable to start? Fuck that. Stick a bit of Feliz Navidad on in May if that's your vibe that day. Start as soon as you want. But when do we ACTUALLY start listening to Christmas songs?


Weirdo that I am, I worked it out.


And then I had to sit on the data for 11 months for it to be relevant again. 😭


(what I did) Last Christmas


Initially, I just wanted to find out which Christmas songs were listened to the most during the festive season (answers in next weeks blog post 😉). So I made a note of the play count on Spotify for all of the best festive jams on November 1st and then compared that to where it ended up at after the season for Christmas songs was clearly over (that answer is coming later in the post).


But I then I had the idea of working out when the biggest daily spikes in listens were. So I picked 17 popular Christmas songs and tracked their play count on Spotify each day from November 1st. As it turned out they were 17 of the 18 most played Christmas songs so a big pat on the back to Matthew and apologies to Kelly Clarkson.


The songs tracked as part of this scientific experiment were:

  • Mariah Carey - "All I Want For Christmas Is You"

  • Wham! - "Last Christmas"

  • Andy Williams - "It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year"

  • Jose Feliciano - "Feliz Navidad"

  • Frank Sinatra - "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!"

  • Ariana Grande - "Santa Tell Me"

  • Brenda Lee - "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree"

  • Bobby Helms - "Jingle Bell Rock"

  • Justin Bieber - "Mistletoe"

  • John Lennon & Yoko Ono - "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"

  • Chris Rea - "Driving Home For Christmas"

  • Band Aid - "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

  • Paul McCartney - "Wonderful Christmastime"

  • The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl - "Fairytale of New York"

  • Bing Crosby - "White Christmas"

  • Michael Buble - "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas"

  • Michael Buble - "Holly Jolly Christmas"


All of the play count data was collected manually from Spotify each day.


This Is When We Step Into Christmas (Songs)




This fantastic table made in Google Sheets shows the sum plays of those 17 tracks on Spotify each day. Focus on the colours rather than the numbers for trends (heat maps ftw).


So the answer is likely what people would probably guess and that's sometime between the last weekend of November and the first weekend of December.


These next 2 tables makes it a little easier to spot where the biggest day-to-day increases are:




The first table shows the daily increase as a total sum and the second table is the same data but as a percentage for a bit of extra context. For the heat map to actually work I treated the Christmas Eve spike as an outlier and set the max value at 50% to make it easier to spot the other jumps.


Now we can see where the big spikes really come from. Clearly, people are much more in the mood for Christmas songs on a Saturday compared to a Friday. Part of that is probably being in an office vs being at home.


Ignoring the giant spike on Christmas Eve, the biggest increases from one day to the next comes on the last Saturday of November, December 1st and the first Saturday of December. Technically there are just as big or bigger increases in the Saturday's earlier in November based on the percentages but you can see from the actual figures that they represent less new listens overall.


These are global listening figures so you can see the American influence at play a little bit here with November 28th being the first day after Thanksgiving and Black Friday.


December 1st feels like a more global date to start rockin around the Christmas tree with the biggest weekday-to-weekday increase. This is usually my starting point but you better believe that I've got a Christmas playlist going writing this incredible piece of content.


The first Saturday of December has the biggest increase of total plays until we reach December 23rd when shit starts to get really serious.


What I should have done is started collecting data at the end of October to see how the big the first day of November jump also was, but alas, here we are.


Santa Tell Me: When Do We Listen To Christmas Songs The Most?


🎅


Let's bring back our first heat map to see when we like to jingle bell rock the most.



Naturally, the closer it gets to beginning to look a lot like Christmas the more Christmas songs we listen to based on the weekly average. It's these hard hitting insights which is why you should give me a follow on Twitter for more fascinating revelations.


What's more interesting though is the daily average (I stopped the average at the week of Christmas to avoid outliers). Apparently we feel more like having a wonderful Christmastime as the week goes on and I love that. Until we get to Sunday and then we calm down a little on wishing it could be Christmas everyday and I can respect that too.


The day when we play the most Christmas songs isn't Christmas Day but rather Christmas Eve with a 20.64% drop off on the day itself.


When Do We Stop The Cavalry Of Christmas Songs?


Pretty bloody quickly it turns out.


Once the day itself is over, Christmas songs fall out of favour pretty dramatically with an 80.67% drop from Christmas Day to Boxing Day and a 93.52% drop from the 25th to the 28th. The 36 million plays on Boxing Day is the lowest total since November 28th.


By December 29th they're very quickly back down to the lowest figure since November 6th.


When Does Michael Buble Start Defrosting?


Yes it's not a very original joke anymore. But I actually worked it out!


I did the same thing that I did above for 17 popular Christmas songs but here I did it for all of the tracks on Michael Buble's Christmas album. I had this idea a little later than the first one so the figures start from November 4th and again, yes it would have been good to see the increase from October 31st to November 1st but we live and die.





I'll cut a familiar story short here because the trends basically fall in line with the trends we've already analysed above. The biggest jump is between the last Saturday of November and the first Saturday of December.


If you want to put an exact date on when he fully defrosts and has a holly jolly Christmas, it would be the last Saturday of November. I'm tracking it again this year so I'll find out if the Saturday increases are because of the day of the week or just a coincidence but I'm 99% sure it's the day rather than the date. That's when the biggest day-to-day % increase comes, while also having a similar total increase compared to the first Saturday of December. So this year it would be November 27th.


Defrosting jokes aside, he doesn't really need to do a whole lot else during the rest of the year when you look at how many plays his Christmas album gets on Spotify during such a small time period. With over 458 million plays at an estimated £0.0033 payout per play, that quickly adds up to over £1.5 million in Spotify royalties alone every Christmas.



When Does Chris Rea Start Driving Home For Christmas?


Ok, I don’t have a great answer for this one but I did notice a trend that made me very happy.


Of the 17 tracks that I... tracked, the biggest % increase in daily plays from December 22nd to December 23rd was "Driving Home For Christmas", and it also had the 2nd biggest % increase the following day at 137.26%, falling only 0.18% behind "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".


So yes, when people start driving home for Christmas on the 23rd and 24th, we do in fact love doing so to a bit of Chris Rea.


Nobody Listens To Christmas Songs Before November Right?


A lot more than you'd think!


Of the 17 songs that I tracked last year, between December 30th 2020 and October 31st 2021 they were played on average over 25.7 million times, with "All I Want For Christmas Is You" notching up over 30.5 million plays (compared to over 209 million during November and December). As a reference point, this is over double the amount of streams "Year 3000" by Busted has so far in 2021.



If you enjoyed this then I've got more Christmas songs related content coming next week 😉


🤶🎄🎅


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