The Ultimate Halloween Playlist

Scary season is nearly upon us and to mark this year's occasion, we have created the ultimate Halloween playlist based on Spotify data, perfect for a spooktacular party. 

To find the most popular tracks, we used a Spotify scraping tool which analysed 996 Halloween-related playlists with a total of 191,811 tracks. We then took the top 50 songs based on how frequently they appear on the playlists. 

Here’s the playlist in full…

Top five  

There are plenty of tracks in the top five which many would have expected to be there, none more so than Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. The song takes the top spot by some distance, appearing on 137 playlists, which equates to 14 per cent of the 996 analysed. 

The 1983-released global smash hit has just shy of 490 million streams on Spotify and is unquestionably one of the most iconic tracks on the list the famous dance routine still parodied 40 years later. 

‘Monster Mash’ (Bobby Pickett) and ‘Psycho Killer’ (Talking Heads) made up the top three appearing 122 and 91 times respectively. 

They were followed by ‘Time Warp’ by Little Nell - a track famous for being part of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Blue Öyster Cult’s classic hit ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ with both being the only other tracks to make over 80 appearances on the playlists analysed. 

Top ten

Andrew Gold’s ‘Spooky, Scary Skeletons’ was just behind ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, making just one less appearance with 79. 

AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ placed next, tallying 67 which was the same as the next track, Flo Rida’s ‘Low (feat. T-Pain)’ but the 1979 hit had more streams, with more than 1.2 billion which is very impressive considering it was released over four decades ago. 

‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ by Eurythmics took ninth spot and had a similarly impressive streaming figure of just over 1 billion hits despite the age of the track. 

The Stranger Things soundtrack, composed by Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein completed the top ten, cropping up 59 times and having more than 66 million Spotify streams.  

Film and TV soundtracks

With both Stranger Things and Rocky Horror soundtracks making the top ten, the trend of films and TV soundtracks continued into the rest of the list with Ray Parker Jr’s iconic Ghostbusters theme music placing in 14th. 

Several other film soundtracks made the list, with world-renowned cinematic composer Danny Elfman boasting five songs in the top 50, making him the artist with the most tracks on the playlist. 

Of those five, his highest-placed track was ‘Remains of the Day’ which is the main theme from the film of the same name starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant. 

Four artists were tied for second place in terms of the number of songs in the top 50 with Rockwell, Rihanna, Rob Zombie and Nelly Furtado all having two tracks. 

Most streamed

In terms of volume of streams, 11 tracks had more than a billion plays, including the AC/DC and Eurythmics entries mentioned above. 

‘Blinding Lights’ by the Weeknd was the most streamed by some distance with more than 3.6 billion, followed by Billie Eilish’s ‘bad guy’ with more than 2.2 billion. 

‘One Kiss (with Dua Lipa)’ by Calvin Harris, ‘Hips Don't Lie (feat. Wyclef Jean)’ by Shakira and ‘Pepas’ by Farruko completed the top five most streamed tracks with the former having more than 1.8 billion and the latter two having close to 1.3 billion plays.