Nielsen: What Don't You Know About Holiday Music

RADIO ONLINE | Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Holiday music continues to grow in popularity each year and radio stations across the U.S. are switching their format to all-Christmas programming earlier each year. But who are the fans of Holiday Music? In a blog post, Nielsen says the growth of Holiday music popularity each year is rooted in what many consider to be the classic era of the genre, the 1950s and 1960s. For many Americans, the ratings firm says, simply hearing those timeless versions of some of the most popular holiday songs is enough to set the mood each year.

But despite that enduring demand for the classics, there is a lot about holiday music that you probably don't know, and Nielsen found some commonly held myths that are "quite easy to dispel" by combining Portable People Meter (PPM) radio trends on the all-Christmas format along with airplay, sales and streaming data for holiday songs, and insights into holiday music fans themselves.

First there's the myth that because the classics endure that only older people must like holiday music. But Nielsen found that more than a third of holiday music fans are Millennials, the largest of any generation. But stations spread the wealth across the years, with a focus on both classic songs ('50s and '60s) along with more contemporary tracks. Streaming on-demand more heavily favors both the classics and the newest music (since 2010).

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of radio stations nationwide will be making the annual seasonal switch to the all-Christmas format, says Nielsen. In each of the past few years, more than 500 stations have gone to holiday programming on or around Thanksgiving, and in many markets, AC stations are the obvious choices to make the flip. But, this format is not the exclusive domain of AC radio. In 2016, AC stations accounted for just over half of the airplay of all holiday music (53%), while the remaining 47% came from a combination of other popular formats, including Country, Classic Hits and even Hot AC.

Also, Nielsen reports, when holiday programming hits the radio dial, things change. During the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year, when holiday stations see their largest spikes in audience, the mere presence of all-Christmas stations affect the radio habits for many other formats, too. In looking at an average of the past five years across PPM markets, it's clear that AC stations stand to gain the most during the holiday programming season, while tune-in across other formats don't budge, and still others (like Country) see listener declines.