Music Machinery

No other holiday dominates our listening like Christmas. During this season, we are exposed to a seemingly never ending playlist of Christmas music. So its no surprise that there’s a huge amount of Christmas music available on Spotify.  How much? Let’s take a look.

How much Christmas music is there?
It is actually quite hard to pinpoint the exact number of Christmas songs. First, every week during the holiday season thousands more Christmas songs are added to the set.  Second, some songs are seasonal – is Frosty The Snowman a Christmas song? Not literally, but it gets a lot of play at this time of year, even by the antipodes. Finally, there are a number of other holidays and celebrations at this time of year such as Hanukkah, Boxing Day, New Years, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, and Festivus that we want to include in this category.  So when I say “Christmas Music” I’m referring to western music that is played primarily during December. There’s probably a better term to describe this music, but terms like seasonal, and holiday have their own special baggage – perhaps something like music coincident with the northern hemispheric winter solstice is the most precise description, but lets stick with Christmas music just to keep things simple. So how much Christmas music is there?  In early December 2014, crack music + data nerd Aaron Daubman  dove into the Spotify + Echo Nest music catalog and found 914,047 Christmas tracks – that’s just under a million Christmas tracks. Let’s unwrap this dataset to see what we can find.

First, some basic stats: Those 914,047 tracks represent 180,660 unique songs and were created by 63,711 unique artists – from Aaron Neville to Zuma the King. The top 20 artists with the most Christmas tracks in the Spotify catalog are all pre-Beatles artists:

Artists with the most Christmas Tracks

Yes, that’s right, Bing Crosby has 22,382 different Christmas tracks (!) in the Spotify catalog. Now, a little digression on what we consider to be a unique track.  Music, especially popular music, is released in many forms. A very popular song, such as Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, may appear on a wide range of albums – from the original studio release to a plethora of Christmas Compilations and artist ‘best of’ albums. Each of these track releases may have different album art, different rights holders and regional licenses. Thus, even though the audio for White Christmas may be the same on each of the release, we consider each release as a different track.

White Christmas
Let’s take a closer look at Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. In our catalog of nearly a million Christmas tracks, 2,196 of them are Bing Crosby’s classic. I’ll say that again, just because it is a rather phenomenal fact – there are 2,196 different albums on Spotify that contain Bing’s White Christmas. It is hard to believe, so I created a web page that contains all 2,196 of the albums so you can see them all.  Click on the image below to load them all up (warning – with 2000+ album covers it’s a bit of a browser buster).

White Christmas isn’t the only uber-track of the holidays. Here are the top 25 Christmas tracks based upon the number of times they have been released on an album:

The most released Christmas tracks

You can see all of the releases for Elvis’s Blue Christmas and Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby  here:

So there are lots of copies of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby out there – but what are the most common Christmas songs overall? Which ones have been recorded the most by any artist?  The following table shows the top 25:

Most recorded songs 

Of course this data may be confounded by the uber-tracks like White Christmas that have thousands of versions by a single artist, so lets look at the most recorded songs by unique artists – that is, we only count Bing Crosby once for White Christmas instead of 2,196 times. When we do that the top 25 changes a bit:

Most recorded Christmas songs (Unique Artists)

The songs in green are the songs that are unique to each list.

Artists with the most number of unique songs
Bing Crosby is at the top of the Most Christmasy artists mainly because of the widespread re-issuing of White Christmas. But if we look at unique songs (i.e. White Christmas only counts once for Bing Crosby), the top Christmas artists look very different – with classical composers, Karaoke ‘artists’ and music factories topping the charts:

Artists with the most number of unique songs

Current popular Christmas crooner Michael Bublé, with 31 unique Christmas songs has a way to go before he makes it on to the most-unique-songs-recorded chart.

Speaking of Karaoke – there’s lots of Christmas Karaoke – 23,472 tracks to be precise.  The top 25 Karaoke songs are the classics:

Top Karaoke Christmas Songs

Top Terms

We can build a good list of seasonal terms by finding the most frequently occurring words in song titles. Here are the top 75 or so, as a word cloud created by wordle (stop words are removed of course).

Longest Christmas song name
There are lots of very long song names in the set of Christmas songs – the longest is this Christmas medly.

Andrea und Manuela – Morgen kommt der Weohnachtsmann – Medley / Morgen kommt der Weihnachtsmann/Leise rieselt der Schnee/Oh du Fröhliche/Ihr Kinderlein kommet/Süßer die Glocken nie klingen/Oh Tannenbaum/Kling Glöckchen/Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht/Alle Jahre wieder – Morgen kommt der Weihnachtsmann/Leise rieselt der Schnee/Oh du Fröhliche/Ihr Kinderlein kommet/Süßer die Glocken nie klingen/Oh Tannenbaum/Kling Glöckchen/Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht/Alle Jahre wieder

A great song for testing how well your music player UI deals with unusual titles.

Conclusion

One would think that with a million Christmas tracks we’d already have more than enough Christmas music – but, it seems, we still like new Christmas music. Ariana Grande’s recently released Santa Tell Me is climbing the streaming charts (currently #44 at charts.spotify.com).

Plus, there’s seemingly no-end to the variety of Christmas Music. If White Christmas with Bing Crosby is not your style, then there’s Blue Christmas by Elvis.

And If that’s not your thing, maybe you’ll enjoy Red Christmas by Insane Clown Posse.