Have you ever been ambushed by an irresistibly catchy tune? One minute you're driving or working, 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. 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
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
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