If you program Christmas music, the first e-mail comes in relatively quickly after the holiday changeover. Inevitably, a listener asks why there isn’t more spiritually oriented holiday music. It’s an e-mail I’ve gotten both in years when my station was playing “O Holy Night” in November and when they were waiting to get closer to Christmas Day to play it.
Over the years, some programmers, particularly holiday music pioneer Dan Vallie, have suggested there’s no need to save “Silent Night” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” until mid-December Also, a few songs, like “The Little Drummer Boy” or “Do You Hear What I Hear” seem to get an earlier start than others.
But last week, researcher Matt Bailey pointed out that only one song out of Spotify’s 40 most-played Christmas songs (Nat King Cole’s “Joy to the World”) is religious. Among Mediabase’s all-format Top 100 most-played holiday songs last week, only four are religious in some form:
- 14 – Gene Autry, “Here Comes Santa Claus,” a Santa song with a religious component
- 28 – Ray Conniff, “Ring Christmas Bells”
- 75 – Martina McBride, “Do You Hear What I Hear”—a song whose strength is obscured slightly by the number of different versions played. Carrie Underwood’s version comes in at No. 101
- 88 – Kelly Clarkson, “O Holy Night”
As radio approaches the two-week mark to the holiday, we took a look at two-hour stretch of a number of AC stations running Christmas formats, encompassing a variety of owners. Between 2-4 p.m. on December 9, most stations played somewhere between two and five holiday songs about the birth of Christ or with some spiritual aspect.
I did count instrumentals of songs whose lyrics about the nativity are familiar to most people of my generation. Just as AC programmers seem to be leaning in more heavily on the pre-rock-era crooners in recent years, there’s also more from the Easy Listening era on holiday radio these days. Increasingly, the songs of faith are from Percy Faith (or Ray Conniff).
Here’s a sampling of major holiday outlets over a two-hour period:
CHFI is one of North America’s most successful Christmas stations. During COVID, I noticed them starting religious Christmas titles right away. This year, the two titles that showed up in the stretch monitored were Canadian, allowing the station to fill its 35% quota with a familiar song, rather than an original/recent title.
- Ali & Theo, “Do You Hear What I Hear (2024)”
- Johnny Reid, “Little Drummer Boy”
- Mariah Carey, “O Holy Night”
- Ray Conniff, “Little Drummer Boy”
- Percy Faith, “Joy to the World”—instrumental
- Martina McBride, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
- Pentatonix, “Joy to the World”
- Peter Breinolt, “Wake Up Little Child”—a local artist whose song is mostly about Christmas now, but alludes to the nativity
- Karla Bonoff, “The First Noel”
- Nat King Cole, “The First Noel”
- Nat King Cole, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”
- Whitney Houston, “Do You Hear What I Hear”
- Martina Mc Bride, “O Holy Night”
- Lindsey Stirling, “Joy to the World”—instrumental
- Elvis Presley, “Here Comes Santa Claus”
- Harry Simone Chorale, “Little Drummer Boy”
- Kelly Clarkson, “O Holy Night”
- Ray Conniff, “Here Comes Santa Claus”
- Amy Grant, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”
- Percy Faith, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”—instrumental
- Frank Sinatra, “Silent Night”
WMGQ (Magic 98) New Brunswick, N.J.
- Nat King Cole, “Joy to the World”
- Andy Williams, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
- Barenaked Ladies f/Sarah McLachlan, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
- Amy Grant, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”
Secular vs. spiritual is an issue for the Christian stations that go all-Christmas as well with two outlets taking a different tack. For purposes of comparison, here’s Christian AC WAWZ New Brunswick from 2-4 p.m.:
- Francesca Battistelli, “Messiah”
- Casting Crowns, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”
- Lauren Daigle, “Light of the World”
- Newsboys, “O Holy Night”
- Mark Maher, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”
- Third Day, “Angels We Have Heard on High”
- Josh Wilson, “Angels We Have Heard on High”
And here’s the very successful KTIS Minneapolis in the 2 p.m. hour alone, where spiritual titles outnumber secular ones:
- Big Daddy Weave, “Go Tell It on the Mountain”
- Jim Brickman, “Joy to the World”
- Jeremy Camp, “O Come All Ye Faithful”
- Casting Crowns, “Joyful, Joyful”
- Nat King Cole, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
- For King + Country, “Angels We Have Heard on High”
- Mac Powell & the Family Reunion, “Away in a Manger/Joy to the World”
- Naomi Raine & Todd Galberth, “Joy to the World/Joy of the Lord”
- Mark Schultz, “The First Noel”
- Third Day, “What Child is This?”
I must say that when it comes to my programming and consulting career one of the things I am most grateful for, as you mentioned, is helping pioneer all Christmas music programming on mainstream radio.
It has become such a programming institution, particularly in AC radio. From a ratings standpoint, it truly seems to be the most consistently impactful long term specialty programming in radio, year after year.
From a personal standpoint, I think it is one of those things that does “Good”. I think of what Nephew Fred said to Scrooge about Christmas in the Christmas Carol (my favorite movie version is the one with George C. Scott as Scrooge)…
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it, can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
Maybe Christmas music on the radio each year helps many people feel the same way.
Merry Christmas and God bless you Sean, and here’s to a happy new year!
Dan
OK,. I’m going to be the Grinch. Most of the songs that permeate the airwaves from late October to Christmas are drippy or just downright stupid – “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” any Christmas song sung by Elvis, especially “Blue Christmas.” The religious ones I can tolerate, even though I’m not particularly religious, as they convey the true meaning of the holiday. I suggest every PD around the world listen to Stan Freberg’s “Green Christmas” before they start playing Christmas music before Halloween.
All-Christmas music may be a hit programmatically, but when the Nielsen comes out, time buyers ignore the numbers because they’re anomalies. So what does it get the station? Adoration from their listeners? I’ll bet that lasts about a week.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I meet them all the time, complaining about too much Christmas music too doggone soon.
I’ll now go back to listening to my non-Christmas CD’s.
Over my forty years in contemporary radio programming, I went from playing a handful of Christmas songs in a new music category to over time, becoming a full-on 24/7 Christmas music super fan….. and the journey was not a smooth one! Back in the day, you protected your format at all costs. Leaving it behind for a month or more was unheard of! I remember a well known consultant who was advising our then-mainstream AC that “people aren’t tuning us for Christmas music”. That was in 1992.
Whether you love , hate or are someone in between, you can’t deny the power of Christmas music in just about every market in America. And after all these years there still seems to be plenty of Christmas music nay-sayers out there. All I can say to that is how fortunate we are to have programming that continually manages to stir passion each year, if but only for a short time, on a medium that seems to be treading water.