#Christmas music how to

This week, Billboard announced that Mariah Carey’s 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' had reached number one in the US for the first time, 25 years after it was first released. But you or your cousins might listen to it, and again next year, and five years later.”

“Media is changing, and if someone released a Christmas grime track – for all I know it's been done – it's unlikely that it would get on to your granny's playlist. “'Love’s Not Just For Christmas' is based on a 1940s to 1990s model of what a Christmas song is like,” says Behr. A Christmas song needs years in order for it to percolate and enter that festive canon. All it needs to do is find itself getting played every year, and that takes time. Ultimately, there’s no reason why an original track can’t become a Christmas classic in the future. “With Christmas music, we don't usually hear it all year round, so we don't get the chance to get awfully sick of it,” Lamont says. But we find ourselves experiencing Christmas music in a completely different way. Normally, pop hits go through what Lamont calls an ‘inverted U-shaped curve’ of enjoyment, which consists of going from not really liking a song, to loving it, to hating it after it’s been overplayed. “He does different versions that are also massively nostalgic because they're heavily influenced by people like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.”ĭespite older Christmas songs being played on repeat every single year, we don’t seem to get sick of those old classics. “What's interesting about Michael Bublé, of course, is he doesn't try and copy,” Carr continues.

#Christmas music how to

“The rest of the record industry know that, because they know how to manipulate nostalgia.” “Sometimes record labels just release the same record, and sometimes they do different versions of it, and repackage it, and it's a really cheap way of making money that’s virtually guaranteed because every year people buy into Christmas,” says Carr. “I’m thinking about, for example, East 17’s 'Stay Another Day', which is kind of a Christmas anthem, but isn't really a Christmas pop song.” “For me, the Christmas pop song might be a pop song which has got content about Christmas in it, while the Christmas pop anthem is more about the themes which occur around Christmas,” says Darren Sproston, professor of music at the University of Chester. It’s also wise to recognise that a song doesn’t necessarily need to be explicitly Christmassy in order for it to do well. “'Love’s Not Just For Christmas' is actually surprisingly effective for something that was written by committee, but we like a sense of authenticity and nostalgia.” There isn’t a magic formula,” says Adam Behr, lecturer in contemporary and popular music at Newcastle University. “Audiences are, like people, not rational.

But it didn’t even enter the charts, let alone the festive Christmas canon. Songwriters Steve Anderson and Harriet Green used this information as a recipe for what should have been the perfect Christmas song – 'Love’s Not Just For Christmas'. 49 per cent of the tracks featured sleigh bells, 95 per cent were recorded in a major key, and the median tempo of the tracks was 115 beats per minute. Lyrically, they all contained something that was either about the home, being in love, lost love, parties, Santa or reindeers, snow or coldness, religion and peace on Earth. Of the top 200 songs, 78 were Christmas or holiday-related.

He looked at the UK Spotify charts for the week of December 25. In 2017, forensic musicologist Joe Bennett from Boston’s Berklee College of Music analysed the elements of the ultimate Christmas song in research commissioned by British shopping centre chain Intu. “All the lyrics are about nostalgia and going back to Christmases in the past.” “Christmas pop songs are all about nostalgia – think about 'White Christmas', which is the biggest selling song of all time,” says Alexandra Lamont, senior lecturer in music psychology at Keele University. Nostalgia is a powerful force in popular culture, particularly around Christmas.