Catchy songs have been around as long as there's been music, but it's still a mystery makes a song stick in our minds.
I recently chaperoned the all-night graduation party at my daughter's high school. After hanging out at an all-games-and-rides-free arcade until 2 a.m., we took the graduates on chartered buses to a private all-ages nightclub in downtown Seattle. It boasted free unlimited fountain soda and snacks, a photo booth with props, a trivia contest, glow necklaces and, best of all, a dance floor with a DJ spinning tunes until 5 a.m.
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.
A pre-AI list of catchiest songs
Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, with its snappy list of female first names, has landed on several catchy tunes lists. Manfred Schmid/Getty Images
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. It got there by directing 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.
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