Fun with Music Analytics: Christmas Has an Effect on How You Stream Music

December 21, 2017 Alan Cross 0 Comments 1 min read

Do your levels of music consumption change with the seasons? According to a study by The Economist, the answer is “yes.”

Weather conditions–and especially the Christmas season–have an impact on how we stream music. Some highlights:

The extra hour of afternoon darkness we get after the switch from Daylight Saving Time increases our average listening by 1.5%.
If the average outdoor temperature drops 10 C, there’s a 0.1% increase in streaming.
If it snows, streaming time goes up by 2%.

Then we come to the issue of Christmas.

Christmas streaming starts in early November and peaks in December (Duh.)
If it snows around Christmas, streaming goes up by 3%.
Too warm for snow? Christmas rain increases listening by 0.5%.
If you live in a particularly religious area, the amount of streamed Christmas music is higher than non-religious areas (Again, duh.)
Access to holiday songs jumps by 25% in Sweden, 17% in the UK, 14% in Germany and 12% in the US. (The Economist didn’t supply statistics for Canada.) To put this another way, one in every six songs streamed in Sweden is a holiday song. In Brazil, it’s one in every 150.
Spotify says that that top 13 Christmas songs have been streamed 1 billion times, with the most popular being Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” with 210m listens. The song has earned more than $60 million since it came out in 1994.