If you think that the in-store Christmas playlists have started earlier than ever then you’re not alone, and you’re also not wrong.
New data shows that people are getting into the festive spirit earlier than ever this year, and also playing more Christmas music.
On December 1 2019, 14 holiday songs featured in Spotify’s top 50 songs in the U.S. On the same day this year, that number was 30, according to data from Graphs About Songs.
However, the transition to more Christmassy tunes began even earlier this year. The site notes that from November 1, five festive songs made their way onto Spotify’s top 200 most played.
As usual, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” – heralded as the annual harbinger of the Christmas period – made the list early.
This year, according to Graphs About Songs, she was joined by “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee, “Last Christmas” from Wham!, Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” and Ariana Grande’s 2014 song “Santa Tell Me.”
By the second week of November, 14 Christmas tunes were in the Spotify top 200, compared with only three in 2022.
Holiday music helps “make people feel part of a collective and make them feel good,” Talia Kraines, an editorial lead at Spotify whose role encompasses North American Christmas playlists, told the Wall Street Journal.
In fact, the only non-Christmas songs hearty enough to compete with the festive spirit and make Spotify’s top 25 by December 10 are industry behemoths including Taylor Swift, with “The Fate of Ophelia,” and “Golden” from hit Netflix movie “K-Pop Demon Hunters.”
Kraines told The Journal that “the first big jump” in holiday-song streaming comes on September 1 (though die-hard fans begin in August), and activity increases steadily month by month from then until the big day.
She added that holiday playlist creation in the U.S. has risen 60 percent year on year from October 2024 to October 2025.
“The traditions of the holiday season, especially the music, provide us an emotional anchor as we face rising costs, a shaky job market, political strife at home and war abroad,” Matt Bailey, founder of the music analytics company Hit Momentum, told The Journal.
Bailey suggests that the trend is true in all periods of stress, highlighting that Christmas music streaming spiked early in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
