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Have you ever been ambushed before? An irresistible catchy tune? One minute you’re driving quietly, the next a tune like Wannabe by the Spice Girls comes on the radio, and suddenly you’re a pop star, singing the words and pounding the wheel. Or maybe you’re at a wedding, and the opening notes of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ spark a group sing-along. What makes these songs so catchy?
I found myself thinking about this at my daughter’s graduation all night. After an evening at an arcade, we took the graduates to a private nightclub. With unlimited soft drinks, a photo booth and DJs beating until 5am, the dance floor was the main event. It was a real-life experience in catchy music. From YMCA to Uptown Funk, some songs had an almost magnetic appeal, drawing everyone to the dance floor.
I watched in amazement as the crowd on the dance floor ebbed and flowed. These teens would go, go, go all day, celebrating their graduation in the shadow of the Space Needle, standing around waiting endlessly. photoHugging friends and grandparents, playing laser tag, driving go-karts, and driving Red Bulls. They had every right to be tired and dragged out.
However, if the DJ played the right song (Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go” was a favourite), they would scream and flood the dance floor, twirling and twirling and repeating the words so loudly that I Apple watch It lit up yellow and warned me to protect my ears. But if the DJ played a song they didn’t like, it was as if a huge vacuum sucked them all out of the dance floor, and the room became quieter than a math test.
It seems like a catchy song can erase 22 hours of no sleep. But what exactly makes a song catchy, and which songs are the catchiest?
In search of answers, I turned to human experts and Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. Tools like ChatGPT, Cloud, Gemini, and Perplexity are increasingly becoming our go-to tools for information, with lightning-fast summaries in an authoritative, very human voice. Meanwhile, there’s an AI-powered DJ Spotifythe dominant music streaming service, so the AI must have a good handle on what makes a tune catchy, right?
As for the humans, well, they’ve actually been on the dance floors dancing to the music, and they’re the ones who know firsthand just how powerful an earworm can be.
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Pre-AI list of the catchiest songs
Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 1 has arrived. 5, with its quick list of female first names, to its many lists of catchy tunes.
Back in 2014, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, issued a list of 20 tones called “musical notes.” The catchiest songs of all time. The museum directed people to an online game in which they identified as many songs as possible, and the songs recognized the quickest made up the top 20.
The game collected data from more than 12,000 people, who, on average, found the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (“Tell me what you want, what you really want”) to be the most popular song. Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5 (“A Little Monica in My Life”) was second at 2.48 seconds, and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger was third at 2.62 seconds. The average total time taken to recognize the clip was 5 seconds.
Here are the top 10 catchiest songs in this study:
- Spice Girls: Wannabe
- Le Bigia: Mamba Nui 5
- Survivor: Eye of the Tiger
- Lady Gaga: Just dance
- Apa: Call for help
- Roy Orbison: Beautiful Woman
- Michael Jackson: Beat it
- Whitney Houston: I will always love you
- Human League: You don’t want me
- Aerosmith: I don’t want to miss anything
I have contacted the museum, and unfortunately, there are no plans to re-study.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the results of this survey were really accurate. Is the song you can quickly recognize really the catchiest song? I can recognize Happy Birthday and the National Anthem, but they don’t get me out on the dance floor. To me, a catchy song has an irresistible appeal, catchy lyrics and a little something extra that sets it above the rest.
What the AI says are the catchiest songs
The late Michael Jackson, shown here in 1988, had plenty of catchy songs, including Billie Jean and Beat It.
Despite certainty Doubts about generative artificial intelligence (hallucinations, robot overlords and all that), I asked OpenAI’s chatbot whether it liked it or hated it ChatGPT What makes a song catchy?
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
“The appeal in music is part science, part psychology, and part cultural context,” ChatGPT told me. “A ‘catchy’ song is one that easily gets stuck in your head (earworm) and makes you want to sing, hum or move.”
The AI chatbot went on to cite choruses, repetitive hooks, simple melodies and strong beats as contributing to the appeal, also noting that “if the average person can hook it up in the car or shower without much effort, it’s more likely to stick.” I’m not sure I need AI to tell me that, but yeah, it makes sense.
List of hottest songs in ChatGPT
However, I asked ChatGPT to pick his list of the catchiest songs of the last 50 years.
Do I trust AI as much as I trust graduates and their instant reactions on the dance floor? I don’t do that, however ChatGPT The menu didn’t have any Visible hallucinations Or weird choices and in fact, the list included the #1 song on the Museum of Science and Industry’s list, the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. This may be because ChatGPT digested the study’s list, but again, it only included the best song from that study.
- Village people: Young Men’s Christian Association
- Oppa: The Dancing Queen
- Michael Jackson: Billie Jean
- Cyndi Lauper: Girls just want to have fun
- Spice Girls: Wannabe
- That river: Macarena
- Outkast: Hey hey!
- Shakira: Your hips don’t lie
- Pharrell Williams: Happy
- Taylor Swift: Get rid of it
List of sexiest gemini songs
I also asked Google Gemini Artificial Intelligence List of the most attractive songs. I agreed with ChatGPT on just two songs, including the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” and Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” — and agreed a lot with the museum’s 2014 study, including “Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega, Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. She also added some catchy songs to the mix:
- The Journey: Don’t stop believing
- Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody
- Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars: Uptown Funk
- Bon Jovi: Living on a Prayer
- Beyoncé: Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
List of Copilot’s catchiest songs
Microsoft’s AI co-pilot Some familiar titles are included in the list of catchiest songs, with Wannabe at the top. It overlaps Gemini and ChatGPT’s menus in a few as well, but has added a few new ones, including:
- Ed Sheeran: Your look
- Carly Rae Jepsen: Call me maybe
- Adele: Rolling in the deep
- Assassins: Mr. Brightside
- Backstreet Boys: I want it that way
Overall, the menus provided by the AI were better than I thought. Girls Just Want to Have Fun, to my Gen When Call Me Maybe came out, it took the world by storm for about a month, with everyone from the Harvard baseball team to Cookie Monster releasing dubbed videos. This could be an interesting way for a party planner to set up a Spotify playlist to keep everyone dancing.
But for a real look at the catchiest songs, I wanted to go back to the real humans whose job it is to make people dance.
A DJ from New Jersey talks about what makes a song catchy
Kool & the Gang’s Celebration is a catchy celebration song that’s played at everything from weddings to birthday parties to reunions.
If there’s any profession that should know which songs are catchy and which are useless, it’s disc jockeys. Mark Pomeroy has spent 35 years working weddings, bar mitzvahs, private parties and other events as a DJ in New Jersey, beginning his career in the vinyl record era in 1989.
“Back then, there was no Spotify, no Napster, no streaming, we didn’t even have CDs,” he told me with a laugh. But one thing remains the same: music brings people together.
“It’s all about communication,” he says. “You’re always trying to connect with the audience, whether you’re a humble DJ or Elton John playing to a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden.”
As for catchy songs, Pomeroy says they can span all genres. What matters is the song’s ability to establish an emotional connection with the listener.
His list of catchy tunes includes:
- Van Morrison’s brown-eyed girl (often requested by brown-eyed girls)
- Cole and the gang celebrate
- The legendary Macarena dance from Los del Rio
- And since his events are often in New Jersey, home of legendary rock band Bon Jovi, Livin’ on a Prophet always gets Jersey crowds jumping. This song also appeared on two of the three catchiest song lists provided by AI chatbots.
What makes a song famous? “The number of beats per minute has a lot to do with this,” Pomeroy says. He knows the beats to the minute of the songs he’s playing, and cites the old DJ saying, “No speeding before midnight,” meaning it’s best to play faster songs late in the evening, when the club or party really starts hopping.
ChatGPT agrees that BPM is important when it comes to catchy songs, noting, “Our brains like to synchronize movement with the beat. A tempo that matches natural human rhythms—such as walking (about 100 to 120 beats per minute) or heartbeat (60 to 100 beats per minute)—sounds particularly catchy.”
Big words from a robot that can’t walk and lacks a heart, but again, I agree.
DJ Atlanta on TikTok and ear friendly vibes
Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club and Hot To Go are among the latest songs to be mentioned when catchy tunes appear.
Atlanta-based DJ Sloan Lee, Malik Sloan Lee Musichas been in the industry for 11 years, and started when female DJs were still a rarity.
“I always customize my collections to fit each client and audience vibe,” she told me. “Over the past several years or so, my audience has become more diverse and sophisticated in their musical tastes, with a mix of American and international influences.”
I’ve seen catchy songs a lot over the years.
“Uptown Funk is being phased out, but it’s still in demand sometimes, and obviously it’s been in demand for a very long time,” she says. “(Chappelle Rowan) Pink Pony Club has been highly requested over the past couple of years, along with Titi Me Preguntó from Bad Bunny.”
Social media has an impact on what is circulated.
“Anything that’s trending on TikTok tends to be in demand,” Lee says. She cites Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, a song that dates back to 1977 but made a comeback a few years ago thanks to a TikTok run.
But while Lee points out that TikTok popularity doesn’t seem to make songs last long in the public’s mind, she’s seen other songs consistently requested over her more than a decade in the industry. Its list also includes:
- Outkast: Hey hey
- Neil Diamond: Sweet Caroline
- Whitney Houston: I want to dance with somebody
- Oppa: The Dancing Queen
- Taylor Swift: Get rid of it
Although artificial intelligence, DJs, and museum surveys all have their say in determining which songs are the catchiest, it seems clear that the comprehensive list of the catchiest songs of all time will change and change forever, with certain constants.
“Any songs that grate on the ear and get stuck in your head — even when you don’t want them to be there,” Lee says.