Spice Girls' ‘Wannabe' Named Catchiest Song Ever By New Study

In a finding that's sure to ignite debates among music lovers around the world, researchers say they've identified the catchiest song of all time.

The winner: the 1996 Spice Girls hit "Wannabe." (Try getting that out of your head now.)

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam worked with the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, U.K., to figure out why some songs are catchy and others are not.

"You may only hear something a couple of times yet 10 years later you immediately realize that you have heard it before," Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, told the BBC. "Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect."

So what makes a song catchy? It's not simply your ability to know it and recognize it. It's how the song stays in your head even when it stops playing -- the so-called earworm effect.

To measure this, the researchers developed a game. Because they're measuring "catchiness," it's not your typical name-that-tune type of arrangement. Instead, you hit the stop button the moment you recognize a tune, and then the game tests the ability of the song to keep playing inside your head.

It's called Hooked on Music, which you can actually play for yourself right here. Warning: Your productivity for the day will plummet the moment you click on that link. Then again, how often do you get to participate in real science?

The game used the top 40 songs from each decade over the past 70 years. Of the 12,000 people who played during the yearlong study period, the Spice Girls track was tops, recognized in an average of 2.29 seconds.

And while the game may seem silly, there is a very serious purpose behind the study. The researchers wrote on the game's website that they hope to use the results to further research into dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Here's the full list of the top 20 catchiest songs, at least as determined by the study:
1. Spice Girls, "Wannabe"
2. Lou Bega, "Mambo No. 5"
3. Survivor, "Eye Of The Tiger"
4. Lady Gaga, "Just Dance"
5. ABBA, "SOS"
6. Roy Orbison, "Pretty Woman"
7. Michael Jackson, "Beat It"
8. Whitney Houston, "I Will Always Love You"
9. The Human League, "Don't You Want Me"
10. Aerosmith, "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing"
11. Lady Gaga, "Poker Face"
12. Hanson, "Mmmmbop"
13. Elvis Presley, "It's Now Or Never"
14. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"
15. Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean"
16. Culture Club, "Karma Chameleon"
17. Britney Spears, "Baby One More Time"
18. Elvis Presley, "Devil in Disguise"
19. Boney M., "Rivers of Babylon"
20. Elton John, "Candle in the Wind"

Lately, I've been having a hard time getting "Time in a Bottle" out of my head.

In thinking about this - I have to think it's more about penetration and differentiation than "catchy". All of these songs were huge hits, with broad commercial appeal (not looking them up, but I think most were number 1's, and many appeared in popular movies and TV commercials) and stayed on the charts for a long time. So people who didn't actively listen to pop music would still get exposed to these songs through osmosis (not Ozzmosis)

Add in the fact that I remember when a lot of these songs came out how different they were from most other stuff on the radio. So they stood out and grabbed people's attention, not because they were catchy but because they were different. So Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a ring on it) is catchy, because it stands out in its own genre, but Subterrainean Homesick Blues is different.

It's an interesting experiment to try and measure "catchiness", but I suspect this missed the mark with the test design. The better test would be to have a group of people listen to a group of songs in a day (say 50), and then check everyday for a couple of weeks to see which songs are still stuck in their heads.

Ah well; I sometimes really wish there as a CD changer on that earworm thing.

Jason