These are the most popular wedding songs in America
“Marry Me” or “Marry You”? “Can’t Stop the Feeling” or “I Gotta Feeling”? “Lucky” or “Get Lucky”? If you’re putting together a wedding playlist, the choices are endless. But if you’d like to know what others across the country are picking, help has arrived. Spotify and the author of its Insights blog, Eliot Van Buskirk, were kind enough to share data on all the wedding playlists made by users since the service started in 2008.
The songs most frequently included on wedding playlists in the U.S :
“Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran; “Marry You” by Bruno Mars’ “All of Me” by John Legend; “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson, featuring Bruno Mars; “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” by Whitney Houston; “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey; “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé, featuring Jay-z; “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri; “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz’ “Hey Ya!” by Outkast
Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” beats Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” for the top spot. But if we expand the list from Top 10 to Top 100, Mars surges ahead. While “Thinking Out Loud” is Sheeran’s only hit on the 100 most-played wedding songs, Mars has three more outside the 10, thanks to “Just the Way You Are” (46th overall), “Treasure” (65th) and “Locked Out of Heaven” (89th).
Doc Vincent, a West Virginia-based DJ who has worked at weddings for 28 years, said that when he’s Dj-ing a ceremony, many couples have asked him to play “Marry You” when they’re exiting during the processional. “People are becoming more modern and unique. Not everyone’s getting married in a church,” he said.
Different data sources can mean different findings. “Hey Ya!” was actually No. 1 in Walt Hickey’s Fivethirtyeight article last year analyzing 163 reader-submitted wedding playlists.
Beyond the Top 100, let’s zoom out even more to see which artists dominate the 1,000 most common wedding tunes.
Alongside Sheeran, Michael Jackson surges into first place with 13 in the top 1,000, fueled by six on the top quarter of that list. “Billie Jean” (28th), “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” (51st), “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” (76th), “Thriller” (138th), “Beat It” (150th) and “Love Never Felt So Good” (175th) all ring in newlywed bliss. But this count doesn’t even give Jackson his full due, because we’re grouping by band or artist name. If we also include his Jackson 5 hits, then “I Want You Back” (40th) and “ABC” (94th) would add to Jackson’s total.
Modern weddings are partial to modern music, but they don’t completely forget the past. One out of every 13 songs on the top 1,000 wedding hits was performed by one of the following artists: Michael Jackson, Queen, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Elvis, Otis Redding, the Beach Boys or the Beatles.
The list runs the gamut from 1950, when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong recorded “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” to March of this year, when Ed Sheeran released “Perfect” and “Galway Girl.”
Of all the songs released before this decade, none checks in higher than Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” at No. 5. It’s also the most popular wedding song for Spotify playlists built in D.C.
The lists of top wedding songs in each state tend to look similar. But more informative is which song is the most uniquely popular in each state. Here’s how we get that bit of info: For every song in each state’s top 500 wedding songs, we subtracted the song’s rank in that state from the song’s rank nationwide to find the song with the biggest gap between the two.
Colorado’s favorite: “Would You Go With Me.”
Some of these songs are hardly surprising. New Jersey weddings feature disproportionate runs of “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. South Carolina girls and guys get married to “Carolina Girls” by General Johnson and the Chairman of the Board. In Texas, they like “She Likes Texas” by the Josh Abbott Band.
California loves “California Love” by 2Pac. Christina Flamer, a California-based wedding DJ who goes by Christina Flame professionally, says, “The No. 1 thing that cracks me up every time is that even couples who say they don’t like rap get into it. They all love ‘California Love.'”
And of course, what West Virginia gathering would be complete without John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”? When Vincent, the West Virginia DJ, was asked for the wedding song unique to his home state, he immediately confirmed Spotify’s answer: “Almost 99.9 percent of weddings I do finish with ‘Country Roads.’ ”