[Joe’s comment]
I appeared on CBS this morning, in discussion with journalist and songwriter David Pogue about What Makes For A Great Christmas Song? (video link). Here’s the first part of the article:
Every year at this time, some of the greatest songs in the world pop up in our playlists. Most of them are decades old, or even centuries. If anyone knows what makes a Christmas song immortal, it’s Berklee School of Music forensic musicologist Joe Bennett. He’s analyzed the holiday pop charts to learn exactly what makes popular Christmas songs popular – “to try and figure out what are the musical characteristics that listeners keep coming back to again and again over the years,” he said… [full feature here]
Interviewer:
- David Pogue (CBS news)
Featuring:
See below for some more info from me and my research colleague Dr John Pierce O’Reilly about the research itself (which focused on UK Christmas music, although much of it also applies to the US and elsewhere). This 11-year study develops some of the themes I explored in the original 2017 study.
Christmas Music Research
Every December in the UK, the same thing happens. The tree goes up, the Quality Street tin appears in the kitchen, and the singles chart quietly fills with songs you probably already know by heart. A new study by Professor Joe Bennett (Berklee College of Music) and Dr John Pierce O’Reilly (University of Oxford) tracks that phenomenon across eleven consecutive years of the Official Singles Chart Christmas-week Top 20 (2014–2024), and finds that UK Christmas-week chart culture is becoming dramatically more seasonal over time.
Headlines
- Christmas songs increasingly dominate Christmas week: Christmas-themed tracks rose from 15% (2014) to 75% (2024) of the Christmas-week Top 20.
- Re-charting is a defining feature of the modern festive chart: the study identifies 96 re-charting tracks in 220 track-instances, highlighting the cyclical return of catalogue recordings and the stability of a Christmas canon.
- Festive listening is concentrated among a small pool of performers: across the eleven-year corpus, roughly ten artists account for the majority of chart appearances, with especially large shares for Mariah Carey, The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl, and Wham!.
- “Home for Christmas” becomes the standout lyrical shift. The motif is described as virtually absent in the mid-2010s, then appears consistently from 2017 and peaks in 2021, when ~30% of charting tracks referenced returning home, family togetherness, or reunion.
- Sleigh bells are increasingly a mainstream expectation: sleigh-bell inclusion shows a clear upward trend; since 2017, sleigh bells appear in roughly half to two-thirds of Christmas-classified entries.
- Streaming-era affordances may amplify the “evergreen” effect: the paper argues that algorithms and curated holiday playlists help direct listeners toward established seasonal standards; as a result, Christmas-week charts “operate under a different logic” than the rest of the year.
Methods (what we did)
The corpus consists of eleven years of UK singles chart data, but only for Christmas week (the chart published closest to 25 December each year). Every charting track in those weeks was included, even if it appeared in multiple years, so the corpus reflects how songs actually recur over time rather than a one-song-one-entry list.
For each track appearance we coded:
Christmas / non-Christmas classification: a song only went into the Christmas category if it clearly referred to Christmas or the festive season.
Primary lyric theme: one dominant theme per track (for example “In love”, “Out of love”, “Home for Christmas”, “Party”, “Peace on Earth”, “Santa”). If a song could fit more than one, we chose the strongest match so each appearance counted once.
Musical and production features: whether sleigh bells are used (and used clearly enough to be heard as a seasonal marker), plus other traits where relevant.
The UK is getting Christmassy-er!
The big trend is simple and pretty striking: Christmas songs increasingly dominate the Christmas-week Top 20.
In 2014, only 15% of the Christmas-week Top 20 were Christmas-themed tracks. By 2024, that figure had risen to 75%. In other words, over the past decade, the Top 20 has shifted from being mostly “normal” pop with a bit of festive decoration to being three-quarters Christmas music.
We’re all Driving Home For Christmas
When you isolate the Christmas-only tracks, one theme clearly rises above all others: “Home for Christmas”. It’s the single largest category in the Christmas corpus, outpacing even romance-based themes.
But more importantly, this theme has grown steadily over time. Earlier Christmas-week charts contained a mix of Christmas archetypes – Santa, snow, peace, novelty songs, winter party anthems. Over the past decade, however, the emotional centre of Christmas music has shifted decisively towards homecoming.
So while the Christmas charts still feature Santa, snow, bells and parties, the dominant mood of the modern festive canon is less about magic or humour and more about Home – being with someone (or missing someone) at the one time of year when it feels like home matters most.
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