It doesn’t take a Christmas miracle to build the perfect holiday playlist. Businesses can use a little science — and a bit of art — to create the ideal holiday music mix.
If you haven’t already read our blog post Christmas Music 101: Yes, Virginia, You Should Play Holiday Music in Your Business, start there. Because now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to get a little nerdy with Christmas Music 201.
1. Humans Like to Learn
Inevitably, a favorite song can turn into a hated song when it’s played too often.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, explained the science behind this:
“If we keep revisiting the same place again and again and again, we never learn,” she said. “So there is a competing drive to explore and find new things.”
Initially, our brains are intrigued and surprised by interesting turns in music. But when there are no surprises left, the song loses its spark — which is exactly what happens when the same version of a Christmas classic plays on loop for weeks.
Music psychology expert Dr. Michael Bonshor of the University of Sheffield connects this to the concept of “flow.”
“Listening to music can be a ‘flow’ experience, which people enjoy for its own sake. It is totally absorbing, to the extent that it distracts them from everyday concerns,” said Bonshor. “However, for an individual to experience ‘flow,’ the activity needs to use their skills in a way that is challenging enough to be interesting. If the music is not sufficiently stimulating, they lose interest — and the music falls out of favor.”
That’s why it’s important not to “kill” the holiday experience by overplaying the same songs. But this must be balanced carefully with our next point…
2. The “Mere-Exposure Effect” (or “Familiarity Principle”)
Simply put: people like what they already know.
The concept dates back to 1876, when German psychologist Gustav Fechner first described it, and was expanded in the 1960s by social psychologist Dr. Robert Zajonc. He found the effect to be so powerful that it was demonstrated across cultures, species, and sensory domains.
Later, a 2011 study using fMRI scans reinforced the finding: famili
