Of all the songs on holiday radio, “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande is particularly interesting to me. It’s the biggest song by an artist regularly having hits at CHR. It was the sixth-most-streamed Christmas hit last week, ahead slightly of Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree,” the most-recent title admitted to the Christmas canon by programmer consensus. It was No. 54 among Mediabase’s most-played holiday titles.
“Santa Tell Me” receives around 30 spins a week at Audacy’s holiday stations. It’s just inside the top 25 at WMJX (Magic 106.7) Boston, and I’ve already heard it on sister WSTR (Star 94) Atlanta, which is playing holiday music for the first time this year. At iHeart’s KOST Los Angeles, it’s at 10 spins. That’s typical of the other iHR stations that are playing it, although WLTW (Lite FM) New York — relatively aggressive on AC’s musical boundaries during the rest of the year — is not so far.
“Santa Tell Me” is the holiday illustration of a discussion that programmers in every current format have. Who decides what is a hit? In Sombr’s “12 to 12” and Olivia Dean’s “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” songs that are streaming but not yet being worked, Top 40 has a few of those to puzzle over now.
Some of the programmer hesitancy over “Santa Tell Me” comes from what we’ve learned over the last 20 years about what the holiday hits are, and how hard new ones are to create. As researcher Matt Bailey has noted, even streaming tends toward older titles. So shouldn’t that make a newer song with a streaming story more legit?
As a programmer scheduling Christmas music, I wrestle several times in the course of a daily log whether to treat “Santa Tell Me” as a hub or a spoke — an established hit or the thing that needs to go between two other powers. But I’m starting to feel as if the audience has decided already, especially since “Underneath the Tree,” only a year older, is now considered an established hit.
As Ross on Radio covers holiday radio this season, I was also curious to see how the holiday songs of the 2020s have fared — those that have cracked the code even a little bit at holiday radio. That doesn’t include “Santa Tell Me,” which is from 2014 near the beginning of Grande’s hit streak. Ed Sheeran & Elton John’s “Merry Christmas” is the most enduring new song of the 2020s so far, with 750 spins this week. The biggest cover is the Backstreet Boys’ 2022 version of “Last Christmas,” with just over 1,100 plays.
I came across “Merry Christmas” for the first time this season on Bonneville’s KSFI (FM100) Salt Lake City, both one of holiday radio’s best-sounding stations and one that has always maintained a subtle difference from the national safe list in a musically distinctive market. Here’s KSFI at 5:25 p.m., December 1, with market veteran Rusty Keys:
- Martina McBride, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
- Train, “This Christmas”
- Ronettes, “Frosty the Snowman”
- Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Jingle Bell Rock”
- Frank Sinatra, “We Wish You the Merriest”
- Michael Bublé, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”
- Meghan Trainor & Seth McFarlane, “White Christmas” — also among radio’s most played ’20s titles
- Leroy Anderson, “Sleigh Ride”
- Beach Boys, “Little Saint Nick”
- Elvis Presley, “Blue Christmas”
- Ed Sheeran & Elton John, “Merry Christmas”
- Nat King Cole, “The Christmas Song”
- Hilary Weeks, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — staged as a “Utah artist holiday favorite”
- David Foster, “Carol of the Bells”
In the UK, where the holiday hits are both a little more rocking and a little newer, “Merry Christmas” is the No. 10 song on Magic Christmas, the all-holiday side channel of the Mainstream AC Magic Radio. It’s behind three 2010s songs — Grande, Clarkson, and Leona Lewis’s “One More Sleep,” which has become a standard there (and has more of a footprint in Canada as well.)
It’s worth noting that when stations beyond the broadcast dial go all-Christmas, their take becomes both newer and more eclectic. It was SiriusXM’s Holly channel, billed as “Modern Holiday Hits,” that moved to Channel 4 to replace TikTok Radio last month. Also, Apple Music Hits — mostly a newer-leaning Classic Hits outlet at other times — has gone all-Christmas this year, and pushes the contemporary discussion well past “Santa Tell Me.”
Here’s Apple Music Hits just before 5 p.m., ET, December 2:
- Andy Williams, “Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season”
- Dan + Shay, “Officially Christmas”
- Phoebe Bridgers, “Christmas Song”
- Jonas Brothers, “I Need You Christmas”
- Ronettes, “Sleigh Ride”
- Sabrina Carpenter, “Santa Doesn’t Know You Like I Do”
- Kelly Clarkson, “Underneath the Tree”
- Bruce Springsteen, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
- ’N Sync, “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays”
- Wham!, “Last Christmas”
- Dido, “Christmas Day”
- Michael Bublé, “Silver Bells”
I took a First Listen to Jimmy Fallon’s Holiday Seasoning on SiriusXM last fall, but I came back to it shortly after Christmas radio kicked in at the suggestion of several readers who were enjoying its more eclectic mix, both newer and deeper than the Mainstream AC version. Here’s Jimmy Fallon’s Holiday Seasoning at 10 p.m., ET, November 8:
- Taylor Swift, “White Christmas”
- Percy Sledge, “Christmas Wish”
- Dean Martin, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”
- Joan Jett & Blackhearts, “The Little Drummer Boy”
- Jona Lewie, “Stop the Calvary” — a UK holiday-radio standard; this was the first hearing of it on this side of the Atlantic
- John Legend, “This Christmas”
- Ronettes, “Frosty the Snowman”
- Willie Nelson, “Here Comes Santa Claus”
- Coldplay, “Christmas Lights”
- Sia, “Santa’s Coming for Us”
- Lou Rawls, “Christmas Is”
- Stevie Wonder, “What Christmas Means to Me”
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