I’ll say that again, just because it is a rather phenomenal fact – there are 2,196 different albums on Spotify that contain Bing’s White Christmas. It is hard to believe, so I created a web page that contains all 2,196 of the albums so you can see them all. In our catalog of nearly a million Christmas tracks, 2,196 of them are Bing Crosby’s classic. Let’s take a closer look at Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Thus, even though the audio for White Christmas may be the same on each of the release, we consider each release as a different track. Each of these track releases may have different album art, different rights holders and regional licenses. A very popular song, such as Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, may appear on a wide range of albums – from the original studio release to a plethora of Christmas Compilations and artist ‘best of’ albums. Music, especially popular music, is released in many forms. Now, a little digression on what we consider to be a unique track. Yes, that’s right, Bing Crosby has 22,382 different Christmas tracks (!) in the Spotify catalog. The top 20 artists with the most Christmas tracks in the Spotify catalog are all pre-Beatles artists: Let’s unwrap this dataset to see what we can find.įirst, some basic stats: Those 914,047 tracks represent 180,660 unique songs and were created by 63,711 unique artists – from Aaron Neville to Zuma the King. So how much Christmas music is there? In early December 2014, crack music + data nerd Aaron Daubman dove into the Spotify + Echo Nest music catalog and found 914,047 Christmas tracks – that’s just under a million Christmas tracks. There’s probably a better term to describe this music, but terms like seasonal, and holiday have their own special baggage – perhaps something like music coincident with the northern hemispheric winter solstice is the most precise description, but lets stick with Christmas music just to keep things simple. So when I say “Christmas Music” I’m referring to western music that is played primarily during December. Finally, there are a number of other holidays and celebrations at this time of year such as Hanukkah, Boxing Day, New Years, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, and Festivus that we want to include in this category. Second, some songs are seasonal – is Frosty The Snowman a Christmas song? Not literally, but it gets a lot of play at this time of year, even by the antipodes. First, every week during the holiday season thousands more Christmas songs are added to the set. It is actually quite hard to pinpoint the exact number of Christmas songs. So its no surprise that there’s a huge amount of Christmas music available on Spotify. During this season, we are exposed to a seemingly never ending playlist of Christmas music. No other holiday dominates our listening like Christmas.
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