Christmas Music by the Numbers
Holiday Radio · Interactive Dashboard
Nov 19 – Dec 25, 2019
About This Project
I had a theory: Christmas music is just the same handful of songs on repeat. And every year, right around November 1st, Mariah Carey emerges from her festive slumber to reclaim her throne. But is she actually the most-played holiday artist, or does it just feel that way? And how small is that rotation, really?
To find out, I built a scraper during the 2019 holiday season that tracked every song played on a Christmas radio station, logging the title, artist, and exact timestamp across 37 consecutive days. What came back was a complete picture of how holiday radio actually works: which songs own the playlist, how tight the rotation really is, and how play counts shift as December 25th gets closer.
Spoiler: Mariah was right. "All I Want for Christmas Is You" played 227 times in 37 days. That's more than 6 times a day, every day, for over five weeks. The throne was never in question.
Details
- •12,329 plays tracked
- •152 unique songs
- •161 artists
- •37-day season
- •Ruby on Rails scraper
- •MySQL database
- •Next.js visualization
Top Songs by Airplay
The top 11 songs aired within 14 plays of each other — a remarkably tight A-rotation
Season Arc
Daily play counts from season start through Christmas Day — the Dec 22–23 dip was a tracker outage
Most-Played Artists
Total plays across the season — hover any artist to see their tracked songs
Cover Version Showdowns
Songs covered by multiple artists — each bar shows how the total plays split across performers
The top 11 songs were played within 14 plays of each other. Programmed with near-mechanical precision.
Dec 25 logged 453 plays. That's 29% above the ~350/day season average, the biggest single-day spike of the season.
Dec 23 shows only 48 plays. The tracker went down, not the station. Santa kept broadcasting.