Christmas, the cliché runs, starts earlier every year. Shops, apparently, push out their Christmas stock earlier and earlier and everyone is giddy with festive delight even before Halloween is over.
Except no one seems to have told music streamers this because the musical lift-off for Christmas holds to a relatively stable pattern every year and, in fact, can sometimes start later than normal.
Based on Last.fm data stretching back to 2005, we can see there is a small uptick in listening to Christmas-centric music in early November each year but things do not really get motoring until early December where a slow but steady growth leads up to the peak listening days of 24th and 25th December.
Thereafter it is a pretty sharp decline in listening as one would expect for music that is so seasonal, with a minor blip happening around New Year’s Eve (which can be explained as Christmas-related music that slips into NYE party playlists).
It appears that Christmas itself is not just for Christmas as there is a low level of streaming of seasonal music across the year. “There is always a small baseline of listening to ‘Christmas songs’ throughout the whole year,” says Mark Holland, lead software engineer at Last.fm. “It never really hits zero.” They might be small in number, but there are listeners out there who pay no heed to the calendar (or the weather) and want to tap into the festive spirit all the time.
Another fascinating point from the historical data is that 24th December, rather than 25th December, has normally been the dominant day for listening – arguably because family time takes precedence over music listening – although that has switched recently.
“Surprisingly, peak Christmas listener counts have historically fallen on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day,” notes Holland. “This trend was only just recently reversed in the year 2019.” (A number of European and Latin American countries host their main celebrations on the 24th, rather than on the 25th, so perhaps this is a factor too.)
The post-Hallowe’en spike and post-Christmas slump
The slump in post-Christmas listening, when it happens, is sharp and unforgiving. “Christmas music listener counts immediately fall to about half of Christmas Day by Boxing Day [26th December],” explains Holland. “People really are sick of Christmas music by then!” Except, of course, that small band of refuseniks who listen to Christmas music regardless of the season.
When multiple years of listening are packaged up and layered on top of each other, we can see a more recent trend (2015-2019 and 2020-2021) that there is a more pronounced spike of Christmas song listening on 1st November (i.e. as soon as Halloween ends).
The first day of Christmas is… getting closer to the 25th
When does Christmas, as defined by listening to Christmas music, actually start? It appears to be getting slightly later each year, running against that perceived notion that Christmas starts earlier each year. Perhaps it does start earlier for retailers, marketers and advertisers, but generally listeners themselves are more resistant to bringing forward the date when they start to add Christmas music into their listening activities.
“This chart [above] shows the day each year when the number of people who scrobble Christmas music exceeds 30% of the maximum for that year,” says Oliver Reynolds, software engineer at Last.fm. “It shows that that date has been steadily getting later year-on-year – with some fluctuation. In 2007, the threshold was reached on 24th November; however in 2020, it was only passed on 5th December.”
That fluctuation is an important one to point out as it reveals a slightly different trend happening for half a decade that has subsequently been bucked.
“Between 2014 and 2019 there is somewhat of a reversal of the general trend – with the Christmas date getting earlier again after steadily falling later since 2006,” Reynolds explains. “However, in 2020 it is pushed back again, perhaps as people spend less time together in the lead-up to Christmas due to Covid restrictions.”
But what *is* a Christmas song, anyway?
It is not quite a debate with the intensity of the “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” arguments that can erupt at this time of the year, but some songs that are most definitely not Chistmassy in sound or lyrical content temporarily became “Christmas songs”.
The most extreme example is ‘Killing In The Name’ by Rage Against The Machine (RATM). Originally released in 1992, it became part of a social media campaign in 2009 to make it the UK Christmas number 1 that year (which it did).
This was done as a protest against the winner of each year’s X Factor TV talent search effectively taking over the Christmas number 1 slot each year. And it has endured (or certainly the spirit of protest has endured), with a recent vote on the UK’s favourite Christmas number 1s to mark the Official Charts Company’s 70th anniversary anointing ‘Killing In The Name Of’ as the UK’s favourite Christmas number 1 of all time.
The RATM track even outperformed ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham!, unquestionably one of the modern Christmas standards, that year in terms of total scrobbles.
“Here it can be seen that the peak scrobble percentage beats out ‘Last Christmas’ By Wham! in 2009, with no after-effects being noticeable the following year,” says Reynolds. “One point of interest is the fact that there is a noticeable bump in RATM scrobbles for about a month after Christmas, whereas the scrobbles for Wham! disappear into insignificance right after New Year’s Day.”
Some artists – notably Slade, Mariah Carey, George Michael, Michael Bublé, Bing Crosby and Andy Williams – have bedded themselves in as part of the sound of Christmas by recording tracks that are passed down through the generations as standards.
To show how important it all is, Mariah Carey recently tried to trademark the sobriquet “Queen Of Christmas” for herself, but was rebuffed by the US Patent & Trademark Office.
Christmas music listening might not start earlier each year and it might not have a trademark-protected queen, but for a month (and a particularly intense two days) each year, Christmas music feels like the only game in town.
