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?
I found myself pondering this at my daughter’s all-night graduation party. After an evening at an arcade, we took the grads to a private nightclub. With unlimited soda, a photo booth and a DJ spinning tunes until 5 a.m., the dance floor was the main event. It was a real-life experiment in catchy music. From Y.M.C.A. to Uptown Funk, certain songs had an almost magnetic pull, drawing everyone to the dance floor.
I watched with fascination as the crowd on the dance floor ebbed and flowed. These teens had been going, going, going all day, celebrating their graduation in the shadow of the Space Needle, posing for endless photos, hugging friends and grandparents, playing laser tag and driving go-karts, chugging Red Bulls. They had every right to be exhausted and dragging.
Yet if the DJ played the right song (Chappell Roan’s Hot To Go! was a favorite), they would shriek and flood the dance floor, spinning and twirling and belting out the lyrics so loudly that my Apple Watch lit up yellow and warned me to protect my ears. But if the DJ threw on a song they didn’t like, it was as if a giant vacuum had sucked them all off the dance floor, and the room grew quieter than a math test.
A catchy song, it seems, can completely erase 22 hours of no sleep. But what exactly makes a song catchy, and which songs are the catchiest?
Seeking answers, I turned to both human experts and AI chatbots. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly becoming our go-to for information, with lightning-quick summaries in an authoritative yet very human voice. Meanwhile, there’s even an AI DJ on Spotify, the dominant music streaming service, so artificial intelligence must have a pretty good handle on what makes a tune appealing, right?
As for the humans, well, they’ve actually been out on dance floors groovin’ to the music, and they’re the ones who know firsthand how powerful an earworm can be.
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A pre-AI list of catchiest songs
Back in 2014, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, issued a list of 20 tunes that it dubbed the catchiest songs of all time. The museum directed people to an online game where they recognized as many songs as they could, and the songs that were recognized the fastest constituted the top 20.
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.
And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the results of that survey are truly accurate. Is a song that you can recognize quickly 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 hook, appealing lyrics and a little dab of something extra that vaults it above the rest.
What AI says are the catchiest songs
Kool & the Gang’s Celebration is a catchy party 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 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.
“Back then, there was no Spotify, no Napster, no online streaming, we didn’t even have CDs,” he told me with a laugh. But one thing was the same: Music bringing people together.
“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.”
As far as catchy songs go, Pomeroy says they can span all genres. What matters is the song’s ability to make an emotional connection with the listener.
His list of catchy tunes includes:
- Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl (often requested by, well, brown-eyed girls)
- Kool & the Gang’s Celebration
- The legendary line dance Macarena, by Los Del Rio
- And since his events are often in New Jersey, home to legendary rock band Bon Jovi, Livin’ on a Prayer always gets the Jersey crowds jumping. This song also popped up on two of the three catchiest song lists that AI chatbots provided.
What makes a song catch on? “Beats per minute has a lot to do with it,” Pomeroy says. He knows the beats per minute of the songs he plays, and cites an old DJ adage, “no speeding before midnight,” meaning faster songs are best played late in the evening, when the club or party has really started to jump.
ChatGPT agrees that BPM matters when it comes to catchy songs, noting that “our brains love to sync movement with rhythm. Tempos that match natural human rhythms — like walking (around 100 to 120 BPM) or heartbeats (60 to 100 BPM) — feel especially engaging.”
Big words from a bot that can’t walk and lacks a heart, but again, I agree.
