What is the most popular Christmas song of all time?

Now the rules of the game are clear, let’s get started! Here are the top 5 most-streamed Christmas songs according to the Official UK Chart:

How many did you get? “Merry Christmas Everyone” is a sure-fire classic, but I’m guessing not many of you (myself included) could have named “Shakin’ Stevens” as the artist…

We have to go a little further down the chart to get some entries from the past decade – well, apart from Mr Christmas himself, Michael Bublé, who’s song “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” comes in at number 6 with 128 million streams. The next highest entries from ‘modern’ songs are shown below.

Perhaps not too surprising to see two of the biggest artists of the 2010’s – Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande – featuring prominently, although Leona Lewis and Kelly Clarkson certainly caught me by surprise.

Given the nature of the scoring system, the 10 songs mentioned so far are going to form our shortlist. We have the golden oldies versus the young pretenders, the household names versus the new kids on the block, the – dare I say it – songs of your parents versus the songs of your kids(?), but who will come out on top?

The second category is YouTube views. The raw numbers here are much higher, as even a 5 second glance counts, but that’s why they are scaled so dramatically. The top 2 from the streaming list remain unchanged, but the new generation comes in hot with Justin, Arianna and Michael Bublé completing the top 5.

The final – and most important – measure is record sales. This is of course most likely to favour the older songs, but as the total score is still to be scaled by the age of the song, don’t count the new hits out just yet!

Once again, Mariah reigns supreme, closely followed by the 1984 classics from Wham! and Band Aid. However, another strong showing from Gen Z in the form of Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande means they could yet sneak it… Let’s find out with the final calculations!

The last step to complete the mathematical formula is to divide the total number of scaled sales, by the number of years since the release of the song. This gives a value for the average number of ‘sales’ per year for each of the shortlist, which is to be used as the final score. Here are the results:

There you have it! Mariah Carey retains her crown as the undisputed Queen of Christmas. Although, I wouldn’t recommend resting on her laurels with Arianna Grande in a very close second. It seems a changing of the (Christmas) guard is almost upon us…

In the eternal words of Shakin’ Stevens, Merry Christmas everyone!

*The decision to count 100 streams and 600 YouTube views each as one sale follows the practice of the Official UK Chart. Since July 2014, 100 streams of a song by a paid user and 600 from a non-paid user each equate to 1 sale in the standard charts. Since the majority of users of music streaming services are now paid users (I bet most of you have a Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon music account), whilst most people use YouTube for free, I hope you’ll agree the scaling decisions I’ve made are reasonable.