I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

The era of music streaming has undoubtedly given us a great deal of new insight into how people listen to music. In the age of purchasing all that was officially recorded was what was bought – there was no information available on how many times, or for how long afterwards, the music fan would listen to that particular album or track. The increasingly rich data that is coming to us now around streaming is helping to fill in these previously uncovered areas - the charts are now as much about measuring the ongoing consumption of music as the initial point of purchase.

It’s already well-established that Christmas is a key time for the recorded music industry, with getting on for a quarter (23.7%) of all the CDs sold in 2016 being purchased in the last month of the year. It’s also worth noting that Christmas-themed albums and tracks are among the most-purchased historically: Now That’s What I Call Christmas has gone through various iterations over time but data from the Official Charts Company shows that it has sold over 1.8m copies since the end of 2012. It’s perhaps less well-known that Michael Buble’s Christmas is the 4^th biggest selling artist album of this decade, behind only Adele’s 21 and 25 and Ed Sheeran’s x.

Streaming data means that we can now also assess the popularity of Christmas music beyond the last few weeks of the year, when it’s most commonly bought. While there are no huge revelations to be unearthed about the volume of plays of Christmas-themed tracks outside of the festive season, it is possible to look at the plays accrued by these Yuletide favourites in the run-up to the end of the year and effectively estimate at what point we start looking forward to Christmas.

Streaming is not quite as December-centric as purchasing – only 11.4% of the 2016 play total took place in the last month of the year. The final week of the year is, unsurprisingly, the peak period for Christmas listening. In the streaming chart for week 52 2016, four of the top five (including the number one) most-listened to tracks were Xmas-themed*. There were 28 tracks released prior to 2016 that were played over 1m times in that seven-day period and we used those as the base of our analysis.

What that analysis showed was that, if cumulative plays of those tracks were analysed on a week-by-week basis throughout 2016, the point at which the streaming total started incrementally increasing was chart week 36**. In every subsequent week up to the end of the year the play count rose, so from this it could be deduced that the music-listening public is already starting to gear up for Christmas at the beginning of September. This trend is borne out by streaming data we’ve seen for this year too – for those same 28 tracks, plays started increasing, again, in the very first week of September.

We also looked at how listening to these songs was spread throughout the earlier part of the year. It’s interesting to note, for example, that these 28 tracks were cumulatively streamed almost 1.7m times in the first week of 2017. The play count doesn’t settle down to under 200,000 until the 8^th week of the year where it remains until that first week in September. This seven-week ‘hangover’ from Christmas 2016 suggests that there are quite a few listeners reluctant to relinquish the joy of listening to festive music. Even though some of these plays will have come from artist playlists, clearly some people do Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.

So what of the period in between? We analysed plays in 2016 for each track from week 8 to week 35 (i.e. late February to the end of August) to see what percentages of their year-long listening tally this stretch accounted for. Across all 28 tracks it amounted to 2.4% - perhaps not a great amount on the face of it, but it’s still surprising to learn that Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You – as unquestionably great as it is – was listened to over 16,000 times in the first week of July.

Of all the 28 tracks, however, the greatest percentage of a song’s 2016 listening accounted for by this period took place on East 17’s Stay Another Day (10.0%). That high share may be because it is one of the least explicitly festive-themed of all the tracks under scrutiny, although it is undeniably associated with Christmas: its play count in the final week of 2016 was over 100 times that of the total in its least-streamed week in August.

As more people stream music, will we see an even greater proliferation of Christmas music in the December charts? In the final week of 2016 there were 13 Christmas-themed tracks in the Official Top 40 Singles Chart – in the same week in 2015 there were only seven. Could this be the year that a Christmas classic tops the chart?

*Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You (number one); Wham’s Last Christmas (number two); The Pogues ft Kirsty Maccoll’s Fairytale Of New York (4); Shakin’ Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone (5). Clean Bandit’s Rockabye was at number three.

** Chart week ending Thursday 8^th September 2016