THAT’s a Halloween Song Now?! Some Unexpected Songs Seeing Streaming Bumps This Oct. 31
Categoria: Musica
This week's Halloween-themed Trending Up also looks at Lady Gaga's status as the new Scream Queen, and how the GOAT spooky-season song is comparing to past years.
Por Billboard | 05/11/2026
Welcome to Billboard Pro’s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip. This week: A Halloween post-mortem, starring “Thriller,” Lady Gaga, and a handful of songs we would not have anticipated having to talk about this time of year. Songs You Won’t Take Home to Mother? Unexpected Spooky-Season Jams Emerge From Rick James, Camila Cabello and More As we find out every year, Halloween is truly in the playlist of the beholder, as songs that seem equally at home the other 364 days of the year to many still get tabbed by some as Oct. 31 standards. One of the biggest examples this year undoubtedly comes via Rick James’ 1981 funk classic “Super Freak,” whose sense of freakiness is much more traditionally sexy than spooky. However, with the “Freak” in its title and an arguable tinge of haunted-house energy to its new-wave-y synths, it’s become an unlikely Halloween perennial — streaming in the seven-digits (1.2 million official on-demand U.S. streams, to be exact) this Oct. 31 for the second year in a row, a 328% gain over the 273,000 streams the song racked up the prior Saturday (Oct. 24). Nearly as surprising is the addition to the Halloween canon of Camila Cabello’s DaBaby-featuring 2020 hit “My Oh My,” another song about a lyrical subject more threatening to parental approval than to personal safety, but with a slight melodic eeriness and an appropriate-enough lyric or two (“He comes alive at midnight”) to slip into Halloween playlists relatively inconspicuously. (In the case of “My Oh My,” there’s also a violent-skewing music video to give it slight slasher-soundtrack cred; music video associations have also helped Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” ) — up 203% to 890,000 — become an Oct. 31 perennial.) Whatever the contributing factors, “My Oh My” also saw a huge Halloween bump, racking up 405,000 streams on Oct. 31, a 192% gain from the prior Saturday. Other emerging Oct. 31 favorites make more sense as Halloween songs, but not necessarily so much as Halloween hits. “My Girlfriend Is a Witch” would not be anyone’s normal idea of 2026 streaming-core, as a little-heard late-’60s nugget from L.A. psych-rockers October Country, who had no major chart history during its career. But whether through long-gestating virality or the whims of the Haunted Algorithm, “Witch” has become a spooky-season streaming staple, generating 493,000 Oct. 31 after posting just 82,000 the prior Saturday, a 505% gain. What other tangentially connected and/or deeply obscure songs will become fright night staples in short order? Queen’s “Death