As the holiday season gets colder and colder and streams of holiday music get warmer and warmer, there are a number of songs that have seen countless covers over the years. Music Reports, the world's most advanced rights administration platform, has compiled a list of the 30 most recorded holiday songs using their Songdex database. Songdex is the largest database of music rights in the world and contains records of both musical compositions and the recorded versions of those compositions.
Sentimental holiday favorite “Silent Night” tops the list with 137,315 recorded versions, followed by “White Christmas,” “Jingle Bells,” “The Christmas Song” and “Winter Wonderland” filling out the top five. Impressively, Mariah Carey’s more modern classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You” rounds out the list, with 13,419 recorded versions just since the song’s debut in 1994 -- a feat rivaled only by “Last Christmas,” written by George Michael for Wham!, with 17,806 versions recorded since 1984.
“With the holidays just round the corner, we thought it was a fun opportunity to showcase the depth of the Songdex registry,” Bill Colitre, vice president and general counsel of Music Reports, said in a statement about the list. “In addition to identifying all of the different recordings of beloved songs, Songdex provides detailed, relational access to song splits and writer collaborations, performance rights affiliations, publisher and label contact information, and much more.”