The Most Connected Artists in Holiday Music
Musicle Team ·
Nearly every artist eventually records a Christmas album, which makes holiday music one of the most collaboration-heavy corners of the entire catalog. Legacy crooners, modern pop stars, and orchestras all end up in the same seasonal rotation, and the data shows exactly how tangled that gets.
The most-connected names in holiday music
| Artist | Credited collaborators |
|---|---|
| Bing Crosby | 224 |
| Mariah Carey | 148 |
| Ariana Grande | 87 |
| Nat King Cole | 84 |
| Josh Groban | 64 |
| Dean Martin | 55 |
| Michael Bublé | 53 |
| Kelly Clarkson | 48 |
| Pentatonix | 46 |
| Idina Menzel | 45 |
| Brenda Lee | 24 |
The Bing Crosby number nobody expects
At 224, Bing Crosby isn't just the most-connected name in holiday music, he'd rank near the top of almost any genre we've measured. Most of it comes from a career that started in the 1920s and never really stopped being sampled, covered, or duetted with. The single most famous entry in his list: a 1977 television duet with David Bowie on "Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy," recorded a month before Crosby died and still one of the strangest, most enduring pairings in music history.
Mariah Carey's number is still growing
"All I Want for Christmas Is You" alone accounts for a steady stream of new entries in Mariah Carey's data, including a remix with Justin Bieber, on top of decades of other holiday duets and remixes. Unlike most artists on this list, her number is actively climbing rather than being a fixed relic of a long career.
Where gospel and Christmas overlap
Kirk Franklin shows up connected to Mariah Carey too, on "Fall in Love at Christmas," a reminder that gospel's most-connected artist treats the holiday season the same way he treats hip-hop and pop: as another room worth walking into.
Worth remembering mid-puzzle
Holiday artists are disproportionately useful hub nodes in Christmas-themed puzzles for exactly this reason: decades of standards means decades of duet partners. Bing Crosby and Mariah Carey in particular are worth remembering as fast connectors if you land on either one.
All of this comes from the same live graph behind today's puzzle.