Mount Prospect man figures out Chicago radio's most played Christmas songs

CHICAGO - Whether it's news about breaking records or memes on social media each year at the holidays, Mariah Carey gets all kinds of buzz for her modern Christmas classic, "All I want for Christmas is You."

But, do we really hear that tune as often as we think we do?

This year, a computer programmer from suburban Mount Prospect set out to find the answer by taking a deep analytic dive into Chicago's Christmas station.

"There's such a meme of everybody saying, 'oh I listen to 'All I want for Christmas is You' 500 times a year!' and I wanted to see if that was actually true," said Matthew Fitzgerald.

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So, starting on November 1st — the day 93.9 Lite FM started playing Christmas music — Fitzgerald set up what's called a web scraper to pull data from the station's archive page.

"And basically put that into the database which I could run the analytics on," said Fitzgerald.

He tracked every song played on 93.9 between November 1 and December 26 at 6:00 a.m., which is when 93.9 returned to regular programming, to find out the top artists, songs, and song titles.

"Those were three separate data points," he said.

With Christmas Day now in the rearview mirror, the results are in. His blog called "A Tale of 187 Christmas Songs: How I Logged Nearly Every Song on Chicago's Christmas Station" unveiled the winners.

According to Fitzgerald, the most played song was the Mannheim Steamroller version of 'Carol of the Bells,' which was played 224 times. That was followed by Andy Williams' 'It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year' with 222 plays, then 'Feliz Navidad' by Jose Feliciano coming in third with 218 plays.

'All I Want for Christmas is You' came in 8th place with 199 plays, according to Fitzgerald.

His research also found Andy Williams to be the top overall artist and 'Sleigh Ride' to be the top song title played (including all versions) with 635 plays.

"Keep it up!" said Fitzgerald about 93.9's song selection. "They're doing a good job of keeping the spirits bright and everything happy for Christmas. And I think that's really the point of what a radio station should have for Christmastime."

If you want to check out the full results, head to Matthew Fitzgerald's blog.