Driving to my family-in-law Christmas dinner, we had Sky Radio playing. My wife cheered, as Mariah Carey’s classic All I Want For Christmas Is You played. Just a song you have to hear this time of year, she claimed, a song that cannot be missed. I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. It had been playing so many times before.
So I decided to test if my feeling was right: that Sky Radio, as Christmas Station, had a few favorites that it kept playing over and over.
I was right. Songs playing 8 or 9 times a day were no exception. Multiple songs playing at least 5 times every day for an entire month. But mostly the fact that every day was basically a repetition of the last one: the first weeks of November played almost 5 times more songs than the same period in December!
Methodology: the source of the data for all charts and tables is Muziekweb.nl, which was scraped automatically. Full code can be found on GitHub.
There’s too few Christmas songs: no diversity in daily playlists
Entering December, Sky Radio only plays Christmas songs. And this leads to the repetitions I mentioned before. For instance, on the first day of December, 110 different songs were on the radio. More than twice that number of unique songs played on the first day of November.
But it gets more repetitive. Look at the same chart, but now for longer periods too: a single day, a week and 20 days of November and December. During the Christmas Period, after listening for a day, you will not hear many new songs anymore: while having heard 110 unique songs on the first day, in the following 19 days you will only hear 73 new songs. This is in contrast to the pre-Christmas period, where you will hear over 600 new songs in these days. This shows fundamentally in the last two bars, where there was 4.5 times less diversity during the Christmas station than before.
The true classics play every few hours for all of December
Speaking of repetitions: some songs are on every day, multiple times. In fact, 9 (!) songs are played every day, at least 5 times, for 25 days straight.
| Artist | Title |
| Mariah Carey | All I want for Christmas is you |
| Chris Rea | Driving home for Christmas |
| John Lennon | Happy Xmas (War is over) |
| Darlene Love | All alone on Christmas |
| Ariana Grande | Santa tell me |
| Band Aid | Do they know it’s Christmas |
| Kelly Clarkson | Underneath the tree |
| Wham! | Last Christmas |
| Bryan Adams | Christmas time |
In fact, 4 of these songs were so popular they were played 9 times on a single day!
| Artist | Title |
| Ariana Grande | Santa tell me |
| Chris Rea | Driving home for Christmas |
| Kelly Clarkson | Underneath the tree |
| Wham! | Last Christmas |
Mind you, this is unique to Christmas. There is no song that comes close to being played this often before. The same goes for the first list: no song was played 5 times every day in November
The ultimate Sky Radio favourites: 12 songs playing for 25% of the time
Just 12 songs, a short CD, account for 25% of the songs played of Sky Radio in December.
| Artist | Title | Times played in December |
| Mariah Carey | All I want for Christmas is you | 177 |
| Wham! | Last Christmas | 176 |
| Chris Rea | Driving home for Christmas | 174 |
| Ariana Grande | Santa tell me | 174 |
| Darlene Love | All alone on Christmas | 173 |
| Kelly Clarkson | Underneath the tree | 173 |
| Bryan Adams | Christmas time | 172 |
| Band Aid | Do they know it’s Christmas | 171 |
| Queen | Thank God it’s Christmas | 165 |
| John Lennon | Happy Xmas (War is over) | 163 |
| Dana | It’s gonna be a cold cold Christmas | 162 |
| José Feliciano | Feliz Navidad | 148 |
Our conversation in the car continued. While I was saying how I wanted to hear some fresh and exciting songs, my wife was emphasizing how it gave her the real Christmas feeling to hear these classics again, and made her really enthusiastic about the Christmas period. Is repetition a bad thing? Definitely not. They claim to have over 6 million listeners during the Christmas period.
Sky Radio for a day is fine. An entire month though? Not for me!