These are the most overplayed Christmas songs

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Thursday, December 24, 2015
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Unless you've been hiding out in a cave with the Grinch for the past few weeks, you've probably heard Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You" more times than you can count by now. And it's still going strong as one of the most popular Christmas songs 20 years after it first came out.

ESPN's statistical analysis blog FiveThirtyEight crunched the numbers to determine the most played holiday songs using several different measures. If you watch a lot of Christmas movies, you might consider the most overplayed songs to be "Jingle Bells" and "Auld Lang Syne" and "Silent Night," which all appear a lot because they are royalty-free. If you go to a lot of choral concerts, you might also be tiring of the most commonly covered songs, which the site determined to be "Silent Night," "White Christmas" and ""Jingle Bells."

FiveThirtyEight also looked at the most popular Christmas songs on Spotify for the week ending Dec. 10. And as exhausted as you might be of "Jingle Bells" and "Silent Night," they fall far down the list when it comes time to measure what people are actually streaming in 2015. That's where "All I Want For Christmas Is You" won out.

Some of the most played Christmas songs today, though, are new songs or new covers. The song "Mary Did You Know," number 10 on the most popular list, got an a capella makeover last year when Pentatonix covered it. That version solidified its place in the ranks of the most overplayed Christmas songs thanks to YouTube, where it's been played more than 50 million times. There's also Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" from 2011, which has 220 million views on YouTube.

Check out this list of last week's most popular songs and get in the Christmas spirit the right way -- by listening to the same songs everyone else is playing.

1. "All I Want for Christmas is You," Mariah Carey

2. "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," Michael Buble

3. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," Brenda Lee

4. "Mistletoe," Justin Bieber

5. "Fairytale Of New York," The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

6. "White Christmas," Bing Crosby

7. "Last Christmas", Wham!

8. "Santa Tell Me," Ariana Grande

9. "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year," Andy Williams

10. "Mary, Did You Know?" Pentatonix

See all the lists of overplayed songs on FiveThirtyEight's website.

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