Over 20 years working with name labels has taught us a thing or two about how parents choose to name their children. During this time, we’ve seen just how many things shape a name choice – family history, culture, and increasingly, what’s on the radio.
This got us thinking. Which names do musicians love to sing about most? And could the biggest hits be putting certain names front of mind for expectant parents?
So, we conducted some research. We screened more than 57.7 million track listings released on Spotify over the past five years to uncover the most ‘serenaded’ names in music, then cross-referenced the biggest song behind each name with ONS birth registration data.
The most serenaded names:
Mary and John came out on top, with 568 and 509 song titles respectively. Every name in the top ten featured in the title of at least 198 songs released between September 2021 and August 2026.
Are songs influencing baby names?
To find out whether these songs are shaping naming choices, we identified the most-streamed song behind each of the top five girls’ and boys’ names. We then looked at UK birth registrations from 2021 to 2025, allowing roughly the course of a pregnancy for a song’s influence to show up in the data.
For a handful of names, the pattern is hard to ignore.
Mary’s biggest streaming hit is “Mary Boone” by Vampire Weekend (2024), which has been streamed more than 13 million times. UK registrations of Mary had fallen every year since 2021, but the decline came to a halt in 2025 – the first year without a drop since our study began.
Maria tells a similar story. Dua Lipa’s “Maria” (2024) has almost 37 million streams, and registrations of the name fell every year from 2021 to 2024 before rising in 2025 – the first increase in five years.
Jane registrations have also risen in each of the last two years of available data. The name’s top track is “Jane” by Skip Marley featuring Ayra Starr (2022), with just over three million plays.
Johnny, meanwhile, is one of the most stable of all ten names we studied, up 13% in the most recent year of data. Its biggest song is not the only story here, though – 304 songs feature the name in the title.
Then there are the names to watch. Jack (“Jack & Jill” by Morgan Wallen, 2025), James (“James” by Laufey, 2025) and Anna (“Oh, Anna!” by Dasha, 2025) all have hits that were released too recently to show up in the latest ONS figures, so their true influence will only become clear in next year’s data. Jack is already the most common of the ten names by raw registration numbers, so it will be interesting to see whether it climbs even higher.
And for the record, the biggest streaming hit of all belongs to John. Taylor Swift’s “Dear John (Taylor’s Version)”, re-released in 2023, has racked up an enormous 156 million streams.
Of course, a song alone won’t decide a baby’s name. But as these figures show, even in an age of algorithms and playlists, a good song can still put a name in parents’ minds.
Methodology:
The research involved analysis of the MusicBrainz catalogue dated 5 September 2026, combined with Spotify streaming data and ONS baby name registrations. Here’s how we identified the most serenaded names:
- First, we screened 57.7 million track listings for recordings with an earliest known Spotify release date between 1 September 2021 and 31 August 2026. Eligible names were drawn from the 1,000 most-used female and male names in ONS England and Wales records for 1996–2025.
- After removing identifiable reissues, duplicate listings and false matches, 30,754 recordings remained featuring an eligible name in the title. We then ranked names by the number of recordings.
- For each of the ten most-featured names, we identified the single most-streamed qualifying song via Spotify streaming data, verified against kworb.net and Chartmasters.org.
- Finally, we reviewed UK baby name registration data from ONS (2021–2025) for each name, with hyphenated compound names (e.g. Mary-Anne, Mary-Beth) grouped with their base name.
Want to find out more about names? Discover our latest baby name predictions for 2026 and beyond.
