The Most Popular Songs to Fall Asleep To
Being as passionate as we are about getting a good night’s sleep, we know that soothing sounds make a big difference in helping us get some good shuteye.
Many studies have proved that music helps release dopamine, a hormone that helps boost our mood. This mood boost helps us relax and in turn soothes our autonomic nervous system. When our autonomic nervous system is calmed, we breathe deeper and our heart rate slows down – creating the perfect state for sleep, all just by listening to music we find relaxing.
With music playing such a big role in getting a good night’s rest, we wanted to investigate what music tracks people listen to the most when they want to fall asleep. So we analysed over 43,000 songs from 560 ‘sleep’ playlists on Spotify to discover the world’s fifty favourite songs to fall asleep to.
Listen to the full playlist in Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Dw1g2ZBlcXYPEGLJV4f3b
These are 25 of the most popular songs to fall asleep to
- Someone You Loved – Lewis Capaldi – 110 bpm
- Heather – Conan Gray – 102 bpm
- All I Want – Kodaline – 86 bpm
- Before You Go – Lewis Capaldi – 112 bpm
- Dynamite – BTS – 115 bpm
- Say You Won’t Let Go – James Arthur – 105 bpm
- lovely (with Khalid) – Billie Eilish – 115 bpm
- Be Alright – Dean Lewis – 127 bpm
- Bruises – Lewis Capaldi – 111 bpm
- when the party’s over – Billie Eilish – 83 bpm
- Falling – Harry Styles – 110 bpm
- All of Me – John Legend – 120 bpm
- If the World Was Ending feat. Julia Michaels – JP Saxe – 76 bpm
- Hold On – Chord Overstreet – 120 bpm
- Get You The Moon (feat. Snøw) – Kina – 119 bpm
- A Thousand Years – Christina Perri – 139 bpm
- Hold Me While You Wait – Lewis Capaldi – 107 bpm
- i love you – Billie Eilish – 70 bpm
- death bed (coffee for your head) – Powfu – 144 bpm
- ocean eyes – Billie Eilish –145 bpm
- Photograph – Ed Sheeran – 108 bpm
- Dancing On My Own – Calum Scott – 112 bpm
- This Town – Niall Horan – 112 bpm
- The Scientist – Coldplay – 146 bpm
- Sign of the Times – Harry Styles – 120 bpm
Lewis Capaldi’s 2018 smash Someone You Loved is the most popular song to drift off to on Spotify, featuring in more sleep-related playlists than any other track. Following close behind is Heather by Conan Gray, a song which Wikipedia even labels a sleeper hit – pun intended!
Kodaline, BTS and another Capaldi track complete the top five of most featured songs in sleeping playlists – in fact, Capaldi has four songs that occur very frequently in sleeping playlists (Someone You Loved, Before You Go, Bruises and Hold Me While You Wait). Capaldi is surpassed as being the most frequent artist in the top 50 by Billie Eilish, who has no less than five slumber-inducing tracks featuring in the most popular sleep playlist songs (lonely, when the party’s over, everything I wanted, ocean eyes and I love you).
Ed Sheeran has three tracks featured in the list, Photograph, Perfect and Thinking out Loud. And artists with two of their hits frequently appearing in sleeping playlists include Calum Scott, BTS, Harry Styles and XXXTENTACION.
Top 10 artists sending us to sleep
When looking just at which artists are featured the most in sleep-related playlists on Spotify, the top ten includes BTS in the top spot with 1712 of their tracks appearing across the data analysed. The only non-pop artist to appear in the most soothing artist list is the Deep Sleep Music Collective (who specialise in creating peaceful music for meditation and relaxation), with 607 of their tracks featured in the 563 playlists analysed.
- BTS – 1712 tracks featured
- Billie Eilish – 785 tracks featured
- One Direction – 701 tracks featured
- Ed Sheeran – 699 tracks featured
- Deep Sleep Music Collective – 607 featured
- Harry Styles – 549 tracks featured
- Lewis Capaldi – 547 tracks featured
- XXXTENTACION – 472 tracks featured
- Ariana Grande – 438 tracks featured
- Shawn Mendes – 396 tracks featured
Methodology
All results are based on Spotify data correct as of 6th November 2020. Most popular artists and songs were calculated by scraping the song data of playlists containing the words ‘sleep’ and ‘sleeping’.
