‘Tis the month before Christmas, which means only one thing: time for Spotify to tell us all we’re onions. According to the music streaming behemoth, whose annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature is out imminently, our multitudinous listening habits are akin to the multiple layers of a malodorous root vegetable. Time to peel it back: don your anthropologist's cap and dive headfirst into your listening history, preferably with a scalpel and a magnifying glass. Unless, like me, you've already done so because you hacked into Spotify Wrapped a week early for journalistic purposes.
I am what I like to call a trackhead. A music junkie. Specifically, it would seem, a dance music junkie, with my top ten tracks from the last six months including Charli XCX's Von Dutch, Confidence Man's Boyfriend (Repeat) and Billie Eilish's L’amour de ma vie [over now extended edit]. Is dance music more inherently addictive than other genres? I was hoping so, if only to offer some sort of excuse when people looked at me aghast for gaining entry to the top one percent of Charli XCX listeners in the year of Brat.
Bad news, though. There's limited evidence to this effect. In fact, "there is no evidence” whatsoever “that music is addictive in the same way as sex, drugs or food", says Dr David Greenberg, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Cambridge. Although music activates the same neural pathways – notably, the dopamine system – it does not share the same elements of dependence and withdrawal as they do.
But what's actually going on when I can't get a track out of my head? There are basic elements that make a song catchy, starting with the aptly termed “hook” (the “mum-mum-mum-maaa” from Lady Gaga’s Poker Face). But there’s no evidence that a song’s general upbeatness makes it more scientifically listenable. If dance music permeates our On Repeat playlists, that’s simply because it’s been the dominant genre on the charts this year.
Anyway, the professionals call this phenomenon "stuck music syndrome". The Germans call it ohrwurm – aka, earworm. Earworms are noteworthy, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis says, because they are “involuntarily”. Margulis is Professor of Music at Princeton and author of the 2013 book, On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. "An earworm seems to infect you outside your own volition,” she explains.
“Earworm” isn’t a cut-and-dry category. One man’s Von Dutch might be another’s Moonlight Sonata. “I've known some really highly trained musicians,” Margulis says, “who told me they could get entire symphonies stuck in their heads.”
The closest thing to a universal explanation for the earworm is "the interplay of tension and release" that occurs within those tracks. Greenberg explains: "You'll often have a certain expectation of where the music is going to go: and when the music achieves that to some degree, but not exactly, that's interesting." Examples might include an unexpected drop, a slightly strained note, or a key switch. Producers must create standout moments while remaining on pitch: tune us in, rather than turning us off. This compels listeners to return to the track in question.
“Earworm” isn’t a cut-and-dry category: one man’s Von Dutch might be another’s Moonlight Sonata
While the term "earworm" tends to be used about a song, it can just as easily refer to a fragment within it: the chorus, the bridge, even a single phrase. But does it also work in the other direction? Can we consider a full album to be an earworm if we feel compelled to listen back to it in its entirety? As I've done countless times, with Doja Cat's Scarlet, Khruangbin's Mordechai, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and indeed Brat – works that are greater than the sum of their parts, in which individual earworms are outshone by the album as a whole.
Perhaps this phenomenon is best explained not by science, but by history. Earworms abounded in the Aughts, when the advent of digital downloads meant artists and producers focused more on singles. The more recent advent of all-you-can-eat streaming and the resurrection of vinyl, twinned with the hyper-poppy, attention-seeking music trends of TikTok, have given rise to a new generation of album-oriented artists who nonetheless know they're under pressure to produce a bop.
It speaks volumes that my top five songs from the past 12 months aren’t just five Charli songs, but five songs from the same album. Whatever code there may be – even the experts aren’t sure – the team at Brat HQ certainly seem to have cracked it.
