The Most-Covered Christmas Songs Ever

Christmas music: It’s unavoidable now, infiltrating our radio stations, dominating our streaming services, and pumped into department stores like a narcotic, gingerbread-tinged gas. It’s almost two weeks out from Christmas, so we’re quickly coming up on its annual apex. And although we know a bunch about the yearly demand for holiday tracks, it’s also worth looking into the supply. The modern Christmas canon is mainly from the middle of the 20th century, but every year artists drop new Christmas tracks, and some of these new stabs at holiday tunes do catch on, to a degree: 2011’s “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber is still in substantial streaming demand, as is 2013’s “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande and 2014’s “I’ll Be Home” by Meghan Trainor.

Still, not all artists are so creative. If you’re going to cut a Christmas album, you’re gonna have to toss a few covers of the classics in there. I wanted to know what the most-covered holiday songs are, and Eliot Van Buskirk at Spotify — which has identified more than 1.3 million tracks of holiday music — was kind enough to send over the data they had. So, for instance, Spotify could tell us that the song “Deck the Halls” is associated with 9,146 individual tracks — appearances on different albums by different artists — in the Spotify database.¹

Here are the 25 most-covered Christmas songs in Spotify’s corpus,² plus the year of their release:

“Silent Night,” “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” are the most-covered songs in the holiday canon. In the right-hand column, I’ve identified (with a Christmas tree!) those songs that have lapsed into the public domain. Unsurprisingly, the free use of some of these songs seems to be a motivation for people to cover them.

Is the ambient noise of Christmas defined entirely by boomer nostalgia and the vagaries of U.S. copyright law? I mean, the newest song on that list, “Blue Christmas,” came out during the LBJ administration, and 60 percent of them came out before 1923, so yes, yes it is.

This phenomenon — that many of the songs that artists cover the most are free and in the public domain — can also be seen in movies. In 2014, I pulled several IMDb data sets for an article about movies nominated for an Oscar. One of these sets was the soundtracks for movies listed on the site, and several of the most common songs that appeared on those soundtracks turned out to be holiday songs.

“Jingle Bells,” for instance, was the most common song in the entire batch of movie soundtracks. I imagine this is mostly because if you need to set the mood and tell the audience it’s the holiday season, playing “Jingle Bells” as diegetic sound is a pretty good way to get the point across.

Here are the top holiday songs that appear on IMDb soundtracks:³

The preference for the public domain is even more striking here: Nine of the top 10 songs are copyright-free. I’ll guess the reason for this is that unless it’s essential to the plot, picking a free holiday song to set the mood over one where you’d owe royalties makes financial sense and doesn’t throw the movie off.

Going back to the Spotify data, though, given what we know about what people actually listen to, it’s pretty clear that the supply for many of these songs wildly outpaces the demand. Only 13 of the top 50 covered songs appeared in the top 50 most-streamed holiday songs during the first week of December. The most recent song to both inspire many copies and see substantial streaming volume is 1985’s “Last Christmas” by Wham!.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to lay down the hottest holiday album of 2016, society probably doesn’t need another recording of “Silent Night.” We do, on the other hand, need thousands more recordings of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” because that song is great⁴ despite being the only song ever recorded with a worse understanding of the continent of Africa than the Toto song “Africa.”

Finally, here are the most-streamed Christmas songs on Spotify in the week ending Dec. 10. Topping the list are the queen and king of Christmas music, Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé.