Have you ever been ambushed by an irresistibly catchy tune? One minute you’re driving calmly, the next a tune like Wannabe by the Spice Girls comes on the radio, and suddenly you’re a full-on pop star, belting out the lyrics and banging on your steering wheel. Or maybe you’re at a wedding, and the opening notes of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ trigger a mass singalong. What is it about these songs that makes them so enticing?
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The game collected data from over 12,000 people, who, on average, found the Spice Girls’ Wannabe (“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want”) the most recognizable song. Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5 (“A little bit of Monica in my life”) came in second, at 2.48 seconds, with Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger coming in third, at 2.62 seconds. The average overall time it took to recognize a clip was 5 seconds.
Here’s that study’s top 10 catchiest songs:
- Spice Girls: Wannabe
- Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5
- Survivor: Eye of the Tiger
- Lady Gaga: Just Dance
- ABBA: SOS
- Roy Orbison: Pretty Woman
- Michael Jackson: Beat It
- Whitney Houston: I Will Always Love You
- The Human League: Don’t You Want Me
- Aerosmith: I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
I reached out to the museum, and sadly, there are no plans to redo the study.
What AI says are the catchiest songs
Despite certain misgivings about generative AI (hallucinations, robot overlords and all that), I asked OpenAI’s love-it-or-hate-it chatbot ChatGPT what makes a song catchy.
- Ed Sheeran: Shape of You
- Carly Rae Jepsen: Call Me Maybe
- Adele: Rolling in the Deep
- The Killers: Mr. Brightside
- Backstreet Boys: I Want It That Way
Overall, the AI-supplied lists were better than I thought they’d be. Girls Just Want to Have Fun, to my Gen X ears, is an irresistible bop that should be on any list of catchy tunes. And when Call Me Maybe came out, it pretty much took over the world for maybe a month, with everyone from the Harvard baseball team to Cookie Monster releasing lip-dub videos. This could be an interesting way for a party planner to set up a Spotify playlist to keep everyone dancing.
But for a true look at the catchiest songs, I wanted to turn back to real humans whose business it is to get people dancing.
A New Jersey DJ on what makes a song catchy
If there’s any profession that should know which songs are catchy and which are duds, it’s disc jockeys. Mark Pomeroy spent 35 years working weddings, bar mitzvahs, private parties and other events as a DJ in New Jersey, starting his career in the vinyl-record era of 1989.
“It’s all about the connection,” he says. “You’re always trying to connect with the crowd, whether you’re a lowly bar mitzvah DJ or Elton John playing to a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden.”
His list of catchy tunes includes:
“I always tailor my sets to each client and the vibe of the crowd,” she tells me. “For the last several years or so, my audiences have become more diverse and sophisticated in their music tastes, with a mix of both American and international influences.”
“Uptown Funk is phasing out, but is still sometimes requested, obviously, it was requested for a very long time,” she says. “[Chappell Roan’s] Pink Pony Club has been requested a lot for the last couple of years, along with Bad Bunny’s Titi Me Preguntó.”
And social media has an influence on what catches on.
But while Lee notes that TikTok fame doesn’t seem to make songs last that long in the public mind, she’s seen other songs consistently requested over her decade-plus in the business. Her list also includes:
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