Have you ever been ambushed by an irresistibly catchy tune? One minute you're driving calmly, the next a tune like Wannabe by the Spice Girls comes on the radio, and suddenly you're a full-on pop star ...

The Spice Girls' song Wannabe made just about every catchy song list out there. They wanna really, really, really wanna zigazig ah! How come some songs make us want to sing along and dance, while ...

Got a song stuck in your head? Catchy songs have been around as long as there's been music, but what makes a song stick in our minds is still a mystery. I recently chaperoned the all-night graduation ...

Ever had a song just...lodge itself in your brain? You're not alone! That's an earworm, and science has figured out why they happen. Researchers at the University of St Andrews developed a formula ...

Researchers find these songs get stuck in your head. — -- From Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," to Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time," to “Mambo No 5,” to Rihanna's "Umbrella," they are the pop ...

When it comes to what makes a song the kind of timeless classic that people will sing along to for decades to come, it can be hard to pinpoint what makes one tune more popular than another...but ...

What makes that earworm an earworm? Musicologists at the University of Amsterdam recently set out to find out, collecting data from 12,000 participants who listened to a random selection from 1,000 ...

Carly Rae Jepsen's hit song " Call Me Maybe" has taken the world by storm, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Don't deny it. Whether you like the song or not, you've no doubt found ...

A new TikTok song is going viral for capturing the political anxiety of 2025 in just 30 seconds—and even John Oliver is calling it “the single catchiest song ever.” Todd (@agiftfromtodd), a musician ...

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The ...

From the Spice Girls to The Macarena, AI chatbots and DJs say these are the songs we can't get out of our heads. Gael Cooper CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, ...