As Halloween nears, we thought it would be fun to look at our public performance data and see how the top Halloween songs are played throughout the year… are they consistently played or are they only played in October?

We couldn’t find a canonical Halloween song chart, so what we asked a friendly neighbourhood AI chatbot to work its magic and give us a top ten. We’ve added the public performance ranking for the song as well.

We have a few ways to look at the play data over time. There are some simple metrics like number of plays or listeners per day, but we also track derivative data - one of which we call “Hotness”. Hotness measures how much activity the song is generating each week, so can also indicate recent popularity. To gauge how much the songs are played year-round, we will use this metric.

Let’s take a look at our Hotness metric for each of the songs in the chart and see whether these songs are played in public performance all year long or just around Halloween...

1. Thriller - Michael Jackson

Public Performance Rank: 2

Looking at Hotness, we can see the song has a huge peak at the end of October last year, but does have playback throughout the year:

Verdict: 🗓 Perennial Pop

2. Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett

Public Performance Rank: 9

As this song is far less popular in public performance settings than Thriller, we have less data and therefore don’t see such a defined spike:

Verdict: 🎃 Ghastly Groove

3. Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr.

Public Performance Rank: 5

Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout

4. Spooky, Scary Skeletons - Andrew Gold

Public Performance Rank: 10

Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad

5. Somebody's Watching Me - Rockwell

Public Performance Rank: 4

Verdict: 🎃 Monster Melody

6. This Is Halloween - Disney Characters

Public Performance Rank: 8

Verdict: 🎃 Graveyard Groove

7. I Put a Spell On You - Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Public Performance Rank: 7

Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad

8. Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon

Public Performance Rank: 7

We can see that this song is played all year around, more than the other songs so far

Verdict: 🗓️ Everyday Earworm

9. Pet Sematary - The Ramones

Public Performance Rank: 6

This is the first song on the chart which is played consistently all-year-around. There is a spike at the end of October, but it’s not that pronounced…

Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout

10. Zombie - The Cranberries

Public Performance Rank: 1

As might be expected for the top-ranking public performance song, we can see lots of plays all year around!

Verdict: 🗓️ All-Season Smash

So... despite the title, is this even a Halloween song? 😱

Steve Robbins, CTO