But it did make me wonder about this marathon 943 hours of Christmas music programming. I had some questions. I was curious about how few NEW Christmas songs there seemed to be. Many artists put out Christmas albums each year, but these are usually just covers of Christmas classics. Was there a golden age of Christmas music? Have musicians stopped trying to make original new Christmas songs? I decided to gather some data and try to answer some of these questions.

I started by downloading the “Recently Played” playlist from LiteFM’s website for a little more than five days’ worth of Christmas music, from November 30th, through December 5th. I ended up with 1,510 songs played over this period of time. This feed lists the song title, artist, album cover and time that the song was played. For each song, I researched the closest I could get to the original “publishing” date — when the song was written or composed — along with the name of the writers and composers where available. That works out to about 122 hours of radio (which includes any ads they ran between songs, which I did not track).

Was there a golden age of Christmas music? Have musicians stopped trying to make original new Christmas songs?

Considering the year in which each song was written, my dataset spanned 484 years of published music. Of course, many of the older songs are considered “traditional” songs, without a clear writer or composer. One obvious thing about this genre is that it is rich with covers (performing a new version of someone else’s song). Of the 1,510 songs played over this period that I was examining, it turns out there are really only about 80 unique songs in the dataset. But from those 80 songs come lots of covers, medleys and live recordings.

So let’s start with the basics. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was the song played the most in my dataset. That’s counting all plays by all 10 versions of the song. “Sleigh Ride” is a close second with 89 plays, with its 11 different versions.