Peach
dlmdd
liahome
Wake The Town
Amnemonic
Stuck in Motion
Contemplative Reptile
Editions
  • International Edition
  • USA Edition
  • UK Edition
  • Australian Edition
  • Canadian Edition
  • Irish Edition
  • German Edition
  • French Edition
  • Singapore Edition
  • Spanish edition
  • Polish edition
  • Indian Edition
  • Middle East edition
  • South African Edition

Radio LBB: Top 20 Most Streamed Christmas Songs

ADD TO COLLECTION

Declan Peters at A-Mnemonic shares how we can quantify the sound of Christmas

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.

view more - Music & Sound
Sign up to our newsletters and stay up to date with the best work and breaking ad news from around the world.

Categories: Media and Entertainment, Streaming Services

A-MNEMONIC | Music & Audio, Tue, 13 Dec 2022 11:02:44 GMT