It is known that during any kind of celebration music is indispensable and the holiday season is no different. Since this time of the year brings positiveness, we decided to analyze the holiday songs to uncover some interesting insights related to musical features and positiveness in songs.

1. Analyzing
Positiveness in
160+ Holiday
Songs

2. It is known that during
any kind of celebration
music is indispensable
and the holiday season is
no different.

3. There are
special class of
songs
dedicated to
Christmas!
Since this time of the year brings
positiveness, we decided to
analyze the holiday songs to
uncover some interesting
insights related to musical
features and positiveness in
songs.

4. The Dataset

5. WE USED ‘CHRISTMAS
SONGS — HOLIDAY MUSIC’
PLAYLIST AVAILABLE ON
FLITR’S SPOTIFY ACCOUNT
TO SELECT THE SONGS.
THEN, THE
ELEGANT SPOTIFYR PACKAGE
WAS USED TO DOWNLOAD
ALL THE MUSICAL FEATURES
OF 167 SONGS IN THE
PLAYLIST.

6. Goals
• Top artists with the most number of holiday songs in the US
• Top 10 most positive holiday songs in the US
• Top 10 most danceable holiday songs in the US
• Top Keys that are used in the top holiday songs in US
• Correlation of musical features of top holiday songs
• Density plot of holiday song duration
• Density plot of energy, valence and danceability
• Heatmap of valence in top holiday songs

7. Top artists with the most number of holiday songs in the US

8. Pentatonix, American a
cappella group from
Arlington tops the list with 9
songs. Two of their top
holiday songs are —
“Hallelujah” and “Mary, Did
You Know?”.
1
Mariah Carey bags the
second spot 6 songs and Elvis
Presley is at 3rd spot with 5
songs.
2
Also, very interesting to see
that the musical TV series
Glee has some of the popular
Christmas tracks.
3

9. Density plot of holiday songs’ duration

10. Very few songs lie below the 100 seconds mark, while the
highest frequency is observed in the 160 seconds and 205
seconds range. The average comes to little more than 180
seconds (~ 3 minutes) which is in line with general song
duration.

11. Top 10 most positive holiday songs in the US

12. As per the chart, the song with the most positiveness, that is likely to
make you happy, is Here Comes Santa Claus by Gene Autry. You can see
that the songs are measured by their valence score. What is valence?
Well, you see our reaction to music is emotional — songs with higher
valence score make us happy and the ones with lower score make us
sad.

13. Top 10 most danceable holiday songs in the US

14. Songs are not just for listening — especially in the holiday
season, you’d expect people to dance (thanks to the parties).
This chart shows ‘Last Christmas’ by Jule Vera is the ultimate
dance song! Here Gene Autry’s song, ‘Here Comes Santa
Claus’ comes second which is the most positive songs
according to previous chart.

15. Top Keys that are used in the top holiday songs in US

16. Music is heavily influenced by the type of keys used. We can
see that some keys occur more in these festive songs than
the others.
Maybe you can use this data if you are working on a holiday
song yourself. C, G and D are more frequent than all the
other keys, so it can be stated with some amount of certainty
that these are “Christmas keys”.

17. Correlation of musical features of top holiday songs

18. In the color-coded correlation matrix of the musical
features, the peach color in the matrix signifies
positive correlation and negative correlation is
depicted by bluish color. The ‘x’ signifies no
correlation.

19. The most prominent findings from the graph are as follows -
• Loudness of a song has strong correlation with its energy
• Danceability and energy have positive correlation with
valence
• Energy are loudness have negative correlation with song’s
acoustic-ness.

20. Since the correlation matrix showed that energy,
valence and danceability have positive correlation,
we would create a chart of their density plot.

21. Density plot of energy, valence and danceability

22. Heatmap of tempo and key combination for valence

23. Tempo is the speed of a particular song according to
musical jargon. It is measured as beats per minute,
i.e., bpm. Since the data set had numerical value for
tempo, we converted that to categorical value based
on the tempo marking.

24. The heatmap shows which key and tempo variation
produces higher valence in holiday songs.
G minor in
Vivace
F# minor in
Vivace
F major in
Moderato

25. This article used data to bring you interesting insights and
we hope it will help you with some smart talking points
for the upcoming parties.

26. A pioneer is custom and large-scale web data extraction.
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