Nothing puts us in the festive spirit faster than turning up the Christmas songs. And nobody loves these tunes more than our neighbours in the capital of the Black Country. Because Dudley has been crowned the UK’s most festive town – based on the fact that it has the most Christmas music lovers per capita.
The research conducted by digital headphones magazine Headphonesty analyzed Google Search data to determine which UK towns and cities love festive jingles most. Based on the highest number of monthly searches per 100,000 residents for the top 100 Christmas songs on Spotify, Dudley is the only UK town to make the top ten – the rest are made up of cities.
Only Wrexham, Inverness, Bath and Lancaster finished ahead of Dudley, which has a very high concentration of Christmas music lovers. With 984 searches per 100,000 people, Dudley’s search volume is neatly twice times the national average of 395. The rest of the top 10 consists of Canterbury, Hereford, Lincoln, Chester and Doncaster.
Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You (shock horror) is the area’s favourite song, however, followed by Lily Allen’s cover of Somewhere Only We Know (we know this was in John Lewis’ 2013 Christmas advert, but is it an Xmas tune?) and Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.
On the other end of the scale, the Black Country bah-humbugs are residents of Walsall. Coming 10th on a list of the ‘scroogiest’ places in the UK, locals searching the least for Christmas songs only did so at 326 monthly searches for every 100,000 people. Its favourite tune was also All I Want For Christmas Is You. So that’s one thing that unites us. All together now, ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need…’