Halloween Streams Lift Lady Gaga, Rick James and a 1960s Psych Band

Lady Gaga's catalogue drew 10.57 million official on-demand U.S. streams on Halloween, Saturday 31 October, up 65% from 6.39 million on the previous Saturday, 24 October, according to Luminate, the data firm whose figures Billboard reported. "On-demand streams" means plays on paid and free streaming services that count toward the charts.

Billboard's Trending Up newsletter, which tracks the biggest percentage gains each week, ran a Halloween post-mortem on the day's listening. It asked whether Gaga has become the season's new music scream queen, noting that she led the gains with three songs.

One of them is "The Dead Dance," a synth-pop single from the soundtrack to the TV series Wednesday. Billboard describes the track as Emmy-nominated.

The biggest percentage jump came from a song most listeners would not have expected. October Country, a group Billboard describes as L.A. psych-rockers, had a late-1960s track called "My Girlfriend Is a Witch." It drew 493,000 streams on 31 October, up 505% from 82,000 the week before. The band has no major chart history.

Rick James's 1981 funk hit "Super Freak" earned 1.2 million streams on Halloween, the second year in a row it has spiked on the day. That was a 328% rise on the 273,000 it drew on 24 October.

Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" logged 890,000 streams on 31 October, up 203%. Camila Cabello's 2020 track "My Oh My," featuring DaBaby, drew 405,000, a 192% gain.

Tame Impala's "Dracula" posted a 2.8 million streaming total for the Halloween period, according to a separate Billboard report published on 3 November. That was 56% more than the 1.8 million the song recorded the previous Halloween.

Seasonal songs have always shown this pattern. Luminate has noted that the spooky songs in its Top 50 chart rarely fill more than a quarter of the list in any October week, and that a track like "Monster Mash" sits quietly for most of the year before the calendar brings it back. The 2026 figures show that the songs most listeners reach for in late October are not always the ones written for the holiday.

For anyone who streams music, the numbers mean a busy Saturday for a handful of catalogues. A surge in plays also means payments to the rights holders and artists behind those songs, since streaming services pay per stream. Whether the spikes last into November is a question the data will answer week by week.