Catchy songs have been around as long as there’s been music, but what makes a song stick in our minds remains a bit of a mystery.
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.
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.
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 not long ago, 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
The late Michael Jackson, shown here in 1988, had plenty of catchy songs, including Billie Jean and Beat It!
Despite certain misgivings about generative AI (hallucinations, robot overlords and all that), I asked OpenAI’s love-it-or-hate-it chatbot ChatGPT what makes a song catchy.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
“Catchiness in music is part science, part psychology, and part cultural context,” ChatGPT told me. “A ‘catchy’ song is one that easily sticks in your head (an earworm) and makes you want to sing, hum or move along.”
The AI chatbot went on to cite repeated choruses and hooks, simple melodies and a strong beat as contributing to catchiness, also noting “if the average person can belt it in the car or shower without much effort, it’s more likely to stick.” Not sure I needed AI to tell me that, but yeah, it makes sense.
ChatGPT’s catchiest songs list
That said, I asked ChatGPT to pick its list of the catchiest songs of the last 50 years.
Do I trust AI as much as I trust the graduating seniors and their instantaneous dance-floor reactions? I do not, but the ChatGPT list didn’t have any obvious hallucinations or weird choices. And, in fact, the list included the No. 1 song on the Museum of Science and Industry’s list, the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. This might be because ChatGPT ingested the study’s list, but then again, it only included the top song from that study.
- Village People — Y.M.C.A.
- ABBA — Dancing Queen
- Michael Jackson — Billie Jean
- Cyndi Lauper — Girls Just Want to Have Fun
- Spice Girls — Wannabe
- Los del Río — Macarena
- OutKast — Hey Ya!
- Shakira — Hips Don’t Lie
- Pharrell Williams — Happy
- Taylor Swift — Shake It Off
Gemini’s catchiest songs list
I also asked Google’s Gemini AI for its list of catchiest songs. It agreed with ChatGPT on only two songs, including the Spice Girls’ Wannabe and Pharrell Williams’ Happy — and it agreed a lot more with the museum’s 2014 study, including on Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5, Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. It also added some more catchy songs into the mix:
- Journey — Don’t Stop Believin’
- Queen — Bohemian Rhapsody
- Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars — Uptown Funk
- Bon Jovi — Livin’ on a Prayer
- Beyoncé — Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
Copilot’s catchiest songs list
Microsoft’s Copilot AI included some familiar titles on its list of catchiest songs, with Wannabe right at the top. It overlapped with Gemini and ChatGPT’s lists on a few, too, but threw in some new ones, including:
- Ed Sheeran — Shape of You
- Carly Rae Jepsen — Call Me Maybe
- Adele — Rolling in the Deep
- The Killers — Mr. Brightside
- Backstreet Boys — I Want It That Way
Overall, the AI-supplied lists were better than I thought they’d be. Girls Just Want to Have Fun, to my Gen X ears, is an irresistible bop that should be on any list of catchy tunes. And when Call Me Maybe came out, it pretty much took over the world for maybe a month, with everyone from the Harvard baseball team to Cookie Monster releasing lip-dub videos. This could be an interesting way for a party planner to set up a Spotify playlist to keep everyone dancing.
But for a true look at the catchiest songs, I wanted to turn back to real humans whose business it is to get people dancing.
A New Jersey DJ on what makes a song catchy
Kool and 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.
An Atlanta DJ on TikTok, vibes and earworms
Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club and Hot To Go are among the more recent songs mentioned when catchy tunes come up.
Atlanta-based DJ Sloan Lee, owner of Sloan Lee Music, has been in the business for 11 years, starting out when female event DJs were still rare.
“I always tailor my sets to each client and the vibe of the crowd,” she tells me. “For the last several years or so, my audiences have become more diverse and sophisticated in their music tastes, with a mix of both American and international influences.”
She’s seen catchy songs aplenty over the years.
“Uptown Funk is phasing out, but is still sometimes requested, obviously, it was requested for a very long time,” she says. “[Chappell Roan’s] Pink Pony Club has been requested a lot for the last couple of years, along with Bad Bunny’s Titi Me Preguntó.”
And social media has an influence on what catches on.
“Anything that’s trending on TikTok tends to be requested,” Lee says. She cites Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, a song that dates back to 1977 but had a comeback a few years ago thanks to TikTok play.
But while Lee notes that TikTok fame doesn’t seem to make songs last that long in the public mind, she’s seen other songs consistently requested over her decade-plus in the business. Her list also includes:
- Outkast — Hey Ya
- Neil Diamond — Sweet Caroline
- Whitney Houston — I Wanna Dance with Somebody
- ABBA — Dancing Queen
- Taylor Swift — Shake It Off
Although AI, DJs and museum surveys all have their take on exactly which songs are the catchiest, it seems clear that an overall list of the catchiest songs of all time will forever shift and change, with certain constants.
“Any songs that are earwormy and get stuck in your head — even when you don’t want them to be there,” Lee says.
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