I Analyzed 122 Hours of Holiday Radio
How many times will you be forced to hear “Wonderful Christmastime”?
It starts well before Thanksgiving. This year it was November 16th at 5pm to be precise. That’s when New York’s WLTW 106.7 LiteFM makes a hard switch to an all-Christmas music program. It lasts until Christmas day. It’s kind of a family rule to keep the car radio tuned to this station for this entire period.
My family and I were driving around recently listening to 106.7’s Christmas music and it seemed that every single time I turned the car on, I’d be forced to hear those terrible eight reverbed synthesizer notes which precede the very worst Christmas song, Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”. Others have said much about why this song is so bad, so I’ll move along.
But it did make me wonder about this marathon 943 hours of Christmas music programming. I had some questions. I was curious about how few NEW Christmas songs there seemed to be. Many artists put out Christmas albums each year, but these are usually just covers of Christmas classics. Was there a golden age of Christmas music? Have musicians stopped trying to make original new Christmas songs? I decided to gather some data and try to answer some of these questions.
I started by downloading the “Recently Played” playlist from LiteFM’s website for a little more than five days’ worth of Christmas music, from November 30th, through December 5th. I ended up with 1,510 songs played over this period of time. This feed lists the song title, artist, album cover and time that the song was played. For each song, I researched the closest I could get to the original “publishing” date — when the song was written or composed — along with the name of the writers and composers where available. That works out to about 122 hours of radio (which includes any ads they ran between songs, which I did not track).
Was there a golden age of Christmas music? Have musicians stopped trying to make original new Christmas songs?
Considering the year in which each song was written, my dataset spanned 484 years of published music. Of course, many of the older songs are considered “traditional” songs, without a clear writer or composer. One obvious thing about this genre is that it is rich with covers (performing a new version of someone else’s song). Of the 1,510 songs played over this period that I was examining, it turns out there are really only about 80 unique songs in the dataset. But from those 80 songs come lots of covers, medleys and live recordings.
So let’s start with the basics. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was the song played the most in my dataset. That’s counting all plays by all 10 versions of the song. “Sleigh Ride” is a close second with 89 plays, with its 11 different versions.
Now if we look at specific versions of songs (including all of those covers), the overall most played track was Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — definitely a classic oldie. But right behind him coming in at #2 (and #3) is Michael Bublé. I have to confess I had never even heard his name before, but the 43 year old Canadian singer (and 4 time Grammy winner) is a force to be reckoned with on the holiday music charts. As of this writing, Bublé currently has 9 songs on the Billboard Holiday 100 chart.
Sure enough, when we look at the data by the most plays by performer, Bublé dominates this list containing some of the greats. The listeners of LiteFM must really love his velvety, smooth voice, as Michael Bublé was played more than six times as much as Frank Sinatra during the period I monitored.
So that’s just the people who sing and perform these beloved songs. What about the actual songwriters behind the scenes? You may not recognize the name Johnny Marks, but you’ve certainly heard his music. Johnny Marks wrote “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” among many other holiday hits. And even though he wrote some of the most classic Christmas songs, Johnny Marks was Jewish (along with Irving Berlin and many other songwriters in this collection). Though it didn’t appear in this data, Marks also penned “Silver and Gold” the catchy tune sang by Yukon Cornelius in the stop-motion Rudolph cartoon.
So if we look at all of the original songs in this collection, and go back and look at them from the year they were written or first published, we can get a sense of when the most played music originated. Sure enough, one decade jumps out as the source of nearly 30% of the songs played during this dataset — the 1940’s.
Nearly 30% of the songs played during the five days I monitored were written in the 1940s.
Amy Grant’s medley of “A Mighty Fortress/Angels We Have Heard On High” was only played once during my data collection period, but this track owns the distinction of having some of the oldest music in the collection, as Martin Luther first wrote the music for the hymn “A Mighty Fortress” in 1529.
Looking at this chart, it’s really remarkable though how things seem to have dropped off after the 1970’s. The 90’s did give us one of the most stellar examples of a true modern Christmas blockbuster, Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” which Carey recorded in 1994. I was actually surprised that AIWFCIY wasn’t in the top 20 most played songs in this collection, as it is currently in its usual spot of #1 atop Billboard’s Holiday 100. Fun fact: There are no real instruments on this recording, as it was all composed on a computer.
Mariah Carey also claims writing credits on another hugely popular Christmas hit, “Where Are You Christmas?” (along with James Horner and Will Jennings) from the 2000 film “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. She originally recorded the song for the film’s soundtrack, but due to the divorce she was going through with Tommy Mottola, she was legally prohibited from performing the song.
So which of these Christmas songs have the most versions? If you were listening non-stop to LiteFM during the period I analyzed, you would have heard 11 different recordings of “Sleigh Ride” (played 89 times) and no less than 10 versions of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (90 plays), though I don’t see why you’d need any version other than Bruce Springsteen’s.
Finally, I wanted to see what the pattern looked like for playing all of these songs on the air. So below is a collection of all the unique songs (including all versions), sorted by most played to least played. Each red box indicates one play per hour. I started collecting data in the afternoon on Friday November 30th and ended on the evening of Wednesday December 5th, and yes it would have been much better to just collect exactly one week’s worth of songs.
I did notice some interesting patterns of certain songs only being played at different times. I reached out to the program director at LiteFM, but did not hear back. Looking at the station’s on-air schedule I do see that some of the patterns match the shifts for different hosts. I’d love to know if the hosts (are they even called DJ’s at this point?) still have some creative control over the playlist. It certainly seems the early midnight to 5am shift is a popular time to play “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. I’ll update this post if I hear back from the station.
You can download the data I collected here . You can send any questions to me at jonkeegan@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
Jon Keegan is a Visual Journalist in the Greater NYC area. He spent 18 years at The Wall Street Journal working with data and building news apps. Created WSJ’s “Blue Feed, Red Feed”, illustrating filter bubbles on Facebook.Other areas of interest include 3D printing and scanning, space, radio and visualizing the unseen.You can see more of his work at jonkeegan.com.
