Holiday Music Puts Shoppers In A Buying Mood

Whether you consider it torture or treasure, blaring Christmas music has become a reliable part of the holiday shopping season, reports Bloomberg.

From malls to grocery stores, highly curated playlists are all part of the bigger scheme to create the best consumer experience possible, one where customers are put in the mood to buy.

“Retailers definitely lean in,” said Radhika Giri, the senior vice president for emerging business at SiriusXM, which has a few enterprises devoted entirely to providing playlists for retail stores. During her more than 12 years at the company, she’s seen demand for such songs only increase. “Every year one of the requests we would get is whether we would start playing holiday music earlier and earlier.”

Nearly all of SiriusXM’s playlists for businesses begin streaming on Nov. 1, and have names ranging from “Jingle Jamz” to “Country Christmas.” With a market value of $23 billion, SiriusXM, which bought Pandora Media in 2019 for $3.5 billion, is one of the largest audio providers in North America. Both entities have teams devoted entirely to creating playlists for stores, and last January, the company expanded further into the arena by buying Cloud Cover Media, a company that has dominated the space of curating music for national brands, like McDonald’s and Party City.

The bulk of national brands opt to outsource their playlists in part because of how cumbersome it can be to deal with music licensing in order to play songs in public spaces, according to Giri. Whole teams of business experts and musicologists work together behind the scenes at companies like SiriusXM to determine the delicate balance of striking a perfect mood for customers.

Across the US, holiday music has seen a boost in popularity since the 2010s, thanks in large part to the rise of streaming services. In recent years, holiday songs have consistently ranked in the Billboard Hot 100 as early as four weeks before Christmas — around the same time many retailers start playing the tunes in stores — and even two weeks after. The songs made up more than a third of the list the week following Christmas 2020. Of those songs, only seven were actually released that year, and just four were original hits. Most of the tunes flooding the charts were released years, and even decades, earlier. The resurgence is at least in part due to Billboard assigning more weight to paid subscription streams for its rankings.

All I Want for Christmas Is You turned Mariah Carey into the unofficial Queen of Christmas, with more than 80 appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 since its release nearly three decades ago. Last year, the song accounted for 1 in every 50 holiday music streams on Spotify. The original or one of the numerous renditions appear again and again on store holiday playlists. Across retailers who gave us their playlists, we identified 13 different versions of the song, including Mariah Carey’s original.

A landmark study from 1993 showed clear evidence that background music can shape shopping habits. Customers at a wine store ended up spending more money — on pricier bottles — when classical music was playing, as opposed to Top 40 hits, according to the study’s results. It also found that the type of music should match the store’s atmosphere and target audience.