Christmas music is a huge industry. That's why there's at least one radio station every market that switches to a Christmas-only format for up to two months of the year and why SiriusXM now has seven different holiday channels this year (one of which is admittedly a Hanukkah station). Michael Bublé has gathered a nice paycheck every December as his holiday albums return to the Billboard Top 10. The folks over at Music Machinery looked into how the trend affects Spotify and found some interesting aka ridiculous numbers. The foremost of which is that the streaming service features more than 900,000 Christmas songs from nearly 64,000 different performers.
How did the number get so high? Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley go a long way. Based on Music Machinery's findings, that trio accounts for more than 53,500 songs on their own. Wait, what? No, Bing "The King of Christmas" didn't record 22.382 individual holiday tracks as the list might seem to suggest...rather, his classic tracks appear on so many compilations that his "individual" songs number into the thousands. For example, his biggest hit "White Christmas" appears on nearly 2,200 separate albums. Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby" and Presley's "Blue Christmas" have also gotten around, appearing on nearly 1,300 albums each.
The ultimate moral to take from all of this is that we as listeners could probably branch out and let some younger turks get some credit. The site lists the Top 20 performers with the most Christmas recordings on Spotify and none of them are more recent than The Beatles (Music Machinery's example). The same applies to the Top 25 recording list.
