Last week we posted a chart on Instagram: the monthly Spotify streams of one song from July 2021 to October 2026. Every October the bar jumps. The song is "we fell in love in october" by girl in red, and it came out in November 2018, after the month in its title had already passed. We built the Reel from Soundcharts data, and while we had the data open we checked Halloween songs, the November 1 handover, and which song was number one in 82 cities. This post is what we found, and what it means for when you release and what you push.
The chart we posted
The Reel is on our Instagram: this song has a favourite month. It shows one bar per month for five years. Every October lights up. If you want the short version, watch that first. The rest of this post is the data behind it and the lessons we drew from it.
- 47M
- Spotify streams in October 2026 for "we fell in love in october" (Soundcharts)
- 2x
- October streams compared to July, every year since 2021 (Soundcharts)
- 6 of 6
- years in which October was the song's biggest month (Soundcharts, data from June 2021)
| Year | July streams | October streams | Biggest month |
|---|
| 2021 | 11.5M | 25.2M | October |
| 2022 | 15.9M | 36.2M | October |
| 2023 | 18.9M | 49.2M | October |
| 2024 | 21.6M | 55.9M | October |
| 2025 | 19.2M | 49.5M | October |
| 2026 | 22.9M | 47.3M | October |
Add the Octobers up and they are 16.5 percent of everything the song has streamed since June 2021. October is 8.5 percent of a year. One month does double its share, every year, for a song that is now eight years old and has passed 1.8 billion streams. In October 2026 it was also number one on the global TikTok songs chart in four of the five weekly snapshots we checked. Monthly totals here are differences in the Spotify play counter, which is the robust way to read Soundcharts. Single-day peaks are noisy, so we do not quote them.
Lesson one: a season is a yearly appointment
Most release advice treats a song as having one moment: release week, then a slow fade. A song tied to a season gets a new moment every year. Nobody at a label scheduled this. Listeners did it, because the title is the month, and the month comes back. The song did not come out in October. It came out on November 21, 2018, and the first October it ever had was eleven months later. The season found it anyway.
The practical reading is that the date on your release calendar matters less than the hook your song gives listeners to come back to. A season, a holiday, a time of day, a city, a weather. If one of your songs already has that hook, you have a yearly campaign and you may not have noticed. Look at your Spotify for Artists numbers by month, not by week. A bump that repeats on the same month two years running is not noise.
Do this: list your catalogue and mark any song with a season, a month, a holiday or a weather word in the title or the first line. Each one gets a reminder in your calendar three weeks before its season starts. That is when the push begins, not when the streams are already up.
Lesson two: holiday songs live on one month
Halloween songs are the extreme case. We compared Halloween 2026 streams to each song's average day in July 2026, using the main Spotify ID for each song.
| Song | Halloween 2026 | July average per day | Multiple | October share of the last 12 months |
|---|
| Monster Mash, Bobby "Boris" Pickett (1962) | 5.9M | 20K | 300x | 40% |
| Spooky, Scary Skeletons, Andrew Gold (Undead Tombstone Remix) | 4.4M | 24K | 184x | 35% |
| Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr. | 6.2M | 95K | 66x | n/a, history starts January 2026 |
| Thriller, Michael Jackson | 6.8M | 1.1M | 6x | 11% |
Monster Mash does 40 percent of its entire year in October. Thriller has the biggest Halloween day of the four, but it streams all year, so the holiday is a smaller share. Both patterns are fine. They just need different plans. A song that lives on one month needs everything spent in the three weeks before it. A song that streams all year needs the holiday as a bonus, not the budget.
Do this: if you have a holiday song, do not spread your ads and posts across the year. Put the whole budget into the three weeks before the date, point everything at one link, and use the holiday itself for one post and one email. The day after, stop. Nobody streams a Halloween song on November 2.
Lesson three: the season ends overnight
Seasonal lanes do not fade, they switch. On November 1, 2025, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" went from roughly 0.6 million Spotify streams a day to 1.85 million. One day. The Halloween songs in the table above fall off the same cliff in the other direction. Our Q4 playbook covers the November 1 reset in more detail.
This matters for a release date. An autumn-themed single released on November 2 has missed its lane by a day and will wait eleven months for the next one. The same single released on September 20 gets six weeks of a rising tide. When a song has a season, release into the start of it, not the end. Two to four weeks before the season begins gives Release Radar and your own posts time to work before the audience arrives.
Lesson four: the season has a map
October's number one was not one song. We ranked the Spotify weekly city charts for 82 cities across October and found 39 different number ones. KAROL G, Judeline and rusowsky's "BbY WOW" topped 15 cities, from Houston and Miami to Madrid and Buenos Aires. ADÉLA's "Nicole Kidman" took 13, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto and Singapore. Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas" was number one in Dallas while Houston chose KAROL G. The Killers' "Mr. Brightside", from 2004, was October's number one in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna. We do not know why, and we are not going to guess.
The point for a smaller artist is that a season is not global either. A song about summer peaks in December in Sydney. A back-to-school song means September in most of the northern hemisphere and February in Australia. If your fan cities are spread across hemispheres, you have two seasons for one song.
Do this: open your fan cities before you plan a seasonal push. If a third of your listeners are in the southern hemisphere, schedule the second push six months later for them. Stage puts a fan map on your Home page on the free plan, built from the people who open your links.
What this means for your release calendar
- Release into the start of a season, not the middle. Two to four weeks before the season begins. The audience arrives on a date, and you want to be on their Release Radar before that date.
- Treat catalogue as releases. A two-year-old song with a season in it deserves the same three-week push a new single gets. The push is cheaper, because the song already has saves and a playlist history.
- Spend on the three weeks before, not the day. Monster Mash did not become a Halloween song on October 31. The listeners show up through the month. Ads, posts and emails go before, the day itself gets one post.
- Check the map. Fan cities tell you which seasons apply to your listeners and when.
- Stop on the day after. The lane switches overnight. Do not spend a cent on an autumn song in November.
If you are planning a new single rather than a catalogue push, the pre-release guide and the release checklist cover the build-up. For the rest of this quarter, the Wrapped checklist has the dates. If you release often, the waterfall strategy is the cadence version of the same idea, and how to grow monthly listeners covers the off-season.
How we pulled the data
All numbers come from Soundcharts, read through its API on October 31 and November 2, 2026. Monthly Spotify streams are differences in the play counter for the song's main Spotify ID. City rankings use Spotify's weekly city charts dated October 8, 15, 22 and 29, scored by position across the four weeks. TikTok placements are the weekly global songs chart. Two things we learned the hard way: the Spotify counter in Soundcharts runs about two days behind, so Halloween shows up as November 2, and well-known songs can have dozens of Spotify IDs. Monster Mash has 46. Use the main one or you will double count.
Frequently asked
What is the best month to release music?
There is no single best month. If your song has a season in it, release two to four weeks before that season starts. If it does not, pick a week you can promote properly, avoid the week before a major artist in your genre, and remember that the week after Christmas is quiet for everything except holiday music.
Do seasonal songs hurt an artist's yearly numbers?
No. A seasonal song adds a yearly spike on top of whatever else you release. "we fell in love in october" streams around 20 million a month off season and more than doubles every October. The off-season number is still a hit.
How early should I promote a holiday song?
Start about three weeks before the holiday. Halloween songs build through October and peak on the day. Christmas songs switch on November 1 and build to the week of Christmas. Spending after the date is wasted.
How do I find out if one of my songs is seasonal?
Look at monthly streams for two years. A bump that lands on the same month both years is a season. Spotify for Artists shows this when you set the date range to two years.
Where did the October 2026 data come from?
From Soundcharts, which aggregates Spotify, TikTok, YouTube and radio charts. We read it through the API and the Instagram Reel linked at the top of this post shows the monthly chart.
Follow the data posts
We post charts like this on Instagram, built from fresh Soundcharts data, with the artists tagged. If you want the same view of your own music, start free on Stage. A fan map and a Smart Link for every release are included on the free plan.
