Streaming has rewritten Christmas songs
Five charts to start your day
Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you are full, highly unproductive, and surrounded by people that love you. Thank you for reading this year, for indulging my charts, my opinions, and the occasional rant. Today’s Christmas special is light on ceremony, heavy on fun, and written in good spirit.
For $10 a month, or $100 a year, you support a simple mission: spread great data visualisation wherever it comes from. You help fund the work of finding, sourcing and explaining the charts that deserve a wider audience. And you back a publication built on generosity, transparency and the belief that better understanding makes a better world.CHART 1 • Streaming has rewritten Christmas songs
This matters because Christmas music used to be about longevity and physical sales. Today it is about repeat listening at scale. This chart shows how the digital era has quietly reshuffled what popularity actually means.
White Christmas still sits at the top, carried by decades of physical sales and cultural memory. Silent Night follows the same pattern. But after that, the hierarchy flips. All I Want for Christmas Is You dominates once streams are counted. Its physical sales are modest by historical standards, yet its annual streaming surge turns it into a recurring hit every single December.
That pattern repeats down the list. Last Christmas, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Jingle Bell Rock all owe most of their modern popularity to streaming rather than sales. These songs are not just classics. They are seasonal assets that reactivate every year, generating the same demand spike on cue. Older tracks benefit from this too, but newer ones are built for it. They slot neatly into playlists, algorithms and short attention loops.
The deeper shift is how success compounds. A song that becomes the default choice for playlists does not fade with time. It reinforces itself. Each year of streaming dominance makes next year more likely. Christmas music has become one of the clearest examples of winner take most dynamics in culture.
Source: All Top Everything
What struck me putting this edition together is how much of Christmas now depends on coordination rather than intention. We want connection, ease and meaning, yet we keep tripping over systems that reward scale, timing and repetition. The tension sits quietly in the data.
There is something human in pushing back against that, even briefly. Leaving early. Choosing the familiar song. Pretending, for a night, that magic still works. These small acts matter because they remind us that not everything has to be optimised to be valuable.
I’ve got four more charts that expand on this story, but they’re for paid subscribers. Consider joining if you want the full edition and a calmer way of seeing the data behind the season.
