Here’s a question to get your musical brain tingling – what is the most played song ever in the history of recorded music?
That means a tune that’s been made in the studio and committed to tape (so forget popular sing-alongs like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle…’ or ‘Happy Birthday’). Some educated guesses have given the honour to those classic hoarders of musical accolades, The Beatles, specifically for 1965 weepie ‘Yesterday’, which has been spun at least seven million times on US radio alone.
Other good choices have previously given the title of ‘Most Played’ to The Righteous Brothers’ 1964 epic, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin”, itself topping over eight million plays across multiple media, or Bing Crosby’s 1942 Christmas classic of Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’. How about Fab 5 Freddy’s ‘Change The Beat’, the most sampled song of all-time, featured in over 1,300 tracks in the last few decades?
Great guesses all, but equally all wrong, at least according to the mighty grey matter of TIME who have done some new calculations and crowned a new victor in the ‘Most Played’ song debate, in news that would’ve made ol’ Walt Disney a very happy man.
It’s technically not by a popular artist, or even a tune that ever managed to gain any traction on the charts or radio, but TIME determines that ‘It’s A Small World (After All)’ is the most played song ever. It’s technically not by a popular artist, or even a tune that ever managed to gain any traction on the charts or radio… but it’s been played nearly 50 million times.
Conspicuously timed with the 50th anniversary of the tune, which was first used at the New York World’s Fair of 1964 as part of Disney’s UNICEF pavilion, ‘It’s A Small World’ has apparently been played nearly 50 million times; staggering numbers chiefly achieved through the nagging sing-song being aired daily at Disney’s theme parks.
Written by in-house composers Richard and Robert Sherman for the New Work World’s Fair exhibit titled ‘PEPSI Presents Walt Disney’s ‘It’s A Small World’, the pavilion ride took patrons on an 11-minute boat tour through different parts of the world where hundreds of animatronic dolls sang the simple refrain on repeat. The ride proved so popular that it ran for two half-year seasons in the Big Apple before it was introduced at the flagship Disneyland Resort in Anaheim.
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The ride and its ‘ad nauseum’ tune have since been replicated at Mickey Mouse-themed parks in Florida (in 1971), Tokyo (1983), EuroDisney in Paris (1992), and most recently Hong Kong Disneyland (in 2008). With five locations running ‘It’s A Small World’ on a regular basis, TIME calculates the Disney parks combined have played the song “for a total of 149 years and eight months,” rounded down to 148 years given days off, closures, and other variables. TIME details.
“Multiply by 365 days per year and you get 54,020 days. According to a Disney fact sheet, “During a 16-hour operating day in the parks, the ‘It’s a Small World’ song is played, on average, 1,200 times.” That would bring the total plays at Disney parks to 64,820,000. Ah, but many of the parks aren’t open 16 hours a day, especially in the winter. The rough, year-round average is about 12 hours. So we take three quarters of the 64-million number and get a very conservative 48,618,000 times the song has been played. Round that up to “nearly 50 million.”
The theme park tune’s status as the most played (and possibly heard) song in human history looks set to be retained as Disney plans a live-action movie based on ‘It’s A Small World’ – much the same way the studio found success with its Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise to the tune of $3.7 billion.
