THE MOST POPULAR HOLIDAY TRACKS OF ALL TIME

Music and travel are a match made in heaven. Whether you’re soundtracking hours on a plane, picking upbeat tunes for group trips with friends and family or creating the perfect playlist for relaxing around the pool, the right music will be a true soundtrack to your holiday. Plus, more often than not, you’ll return home remembering the track that came to define your trip. 

We wanted to uncover the most popular songs and artists for holiday makers and playlist planners of all time. As Spotify is one of the world’s leading playlist creation apps, we used this as the basis for our research. We searched various relevant playlists, giving us a selection of 7,028 to analyse, featuring over 154,624 tracks and 20,994 unique artists. Now we can reveal the most popular holiday tracks of all time.

Poolside Playlists

So without further ado, the top holiday tracks of all time (up to 2020) are…

1. Piece Of Your Heart by MEDUZA, which featured in 272 playlists.
2. Summer by Calvin Harris, which featured in 235 playlists.
3. Dance Monkey by Tones and I, which featured in 218 playlists.

MEDUZA’s Piece Of Your Heart has arguably one of the catchiest hooks in dance history, with its ‘What? Sorry, just quickly, what if it's…’ lyric. This has made it popular with DJs across the world in 2019, and indicates why there are over 2 million search hits for remixes of the song on Google. Harris’ aptly named Summer debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart, and earned nominations for British Single and British Artist Video at the 2015 Brit Awards. Dance Monkey by Tones and I broke records across the world during its release in 2019, rising to number 1 in 22 countries, so it’s no surprise to see it in our top 3.

Clearly, Calvin Harris’ Summer isn’t his only well-received holiday tune, as he is the most popular artist across all summer playlists.

The top three artists are…

1. Calvin Harris, who features in a massive 1,802 summer playlists.
2. Ed Sheeran, a close second with 1,352 playlist features.
3. Post Malone, who features in 1,187 summer playlists.

Those looking for a more nostalgic sound will be pleased to see some classics in the top 100, including…

• Africa by TOTO, which ranked at 46^th and featured in 110 playlists.
• Summer Of ’69 by Bryan Adams, which ranked at 58 with 106 playlist features.
• Three Little Birds by Bob Marley & The Wailers, which squeezed in at 88, with 89 playlist inclusions.

Other notable mentions include Seeb’s remix of I Took A Pill in Ibiza (30^th), One Dance by Drake (38^th) and Lui Fonsi’s Despacito Remix (39^th).

Fancy listening to the full list, or want to save these for your next trip? We’ve created a playlist of the top 50 most popular holiday playlist tracks – check it out below.

Follow the playlist to stay up to date!

Looking ahead to the next decade

We may still be in the early stages of the new decade, but some Spotify users are already planning their 2020 holiday playlists. Tones and I’s Dance Monkey is still proving popular, with Shawn Mendes also still in the top ten. Here are the top tracks so far…

To explore all 154,624 tracks – take a look here:

View the list in Google Sheets

Data pulled from every playlist on Spotify that contained ‘holiday playlist’, ‘beach playlist’, ‘summer tunes’, ‘summer time songs’ and ‘holiday playlist 2020’. Data is correct as of 07/01/2020.