NEW YORK, NY (Top40 Charts/ ASCAP Official Website) - Although "
Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" marked the unofficial start of the holiday season for many people, radio stations across the country have been spinning holiday favorites for many weeks prior to Thanksgiving weekend. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has compiled holiday song data, tracked by radio airplay monitoring service Mediaguide, from over 2,600 radio stations nationwide. The results show that dozens of stations have already begun to deck their halls, and lists which songs are most popular so far this holiday season.
Highlights of the data include:
- 1,329 different holiday songs have been played on radio stations from October 1, 2007 to November 26, 2007.
- Holiday songs have been played 1,269,792 times altogether.
- WEXM 93.1 (Indianapolis) was the first station to switch to all-holiday music programming way back on October 8, and since then, 155 additional stations have switched to all-holiday, all the time playlists.
- The top 10 most-played holiday songs in the ASCAP repertoire so far this holiday season are:
1. "Sleigh Ride" (Leroy Anderson, Mitchell Parish) - played 48,737 times
2. "Winter Wonderland" (Felix Bernard, Richard B. Smith) - played 45,309 times
3. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin) - played 35,206 times
4. "Jingle Bell Rock" (Joseph Carleton Beal, James Roth Boothe) - played 33,503 times
5. "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (Edward Pola, George Wyle) - played 32,865 times
6. "White Christmas" (Irving Berlin) - played 32,498 times
7. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" (Johnny Marks) - played 28,892 times
8. "Silver Bells" (Ray Evans, Jay Livingston) - played 24,501 times
9. "Frosty the Snowman" (Steve Nelson, Walter E. Rollins) - played 24,394 times
10. "A Holly Jolly Christmas" (Johnny Marks) - played 24,238 times
* Note: The above list represents an aggregation of all different artist versions of each cited holiday song.
Members of the press who would like a custom week-to-week or local run of real-time 2007 holiday song airplay may contact Kathleen Reynolds (CooperKatz for Mediaguide) at 212-455-8062 or [email protected].
Mediaguide, co-owned by ASCAP, was launched in 2002 to monitor radio broadcast music in real-time and facilitate the accurate distribution of royalty payments to songwriters, composers and publishers. Its proprietary technology and network of over 2,600 radio stations currently tracks more stations and total airplay than any other monitoring service in the U.S.
