At the height of her career, Mariah Carey took a risk by releasing a holiday song.
Given what we know about the singer who has dubbed herself "Queen of Christmas," and the ubiquity of the seasonal hit that earned her that title, it might seem crazy to think of "All I Want For Christmas Is You" as anything other than a holiday juggernaut. But back in the mid-1990s, Christmas music simply wasn't seen as big business.
"It wasn't a known science at all back then, and there was nobody who did new, big Christmas songs," her songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff said to Billboard in 2014.
Carey already had a dozen top 10 hits by the time she released "All I Want for Christmas is You," many of them written and produced with Afanasieff. For their new song, they paired her pop diva vocals with production inspired by holiday classics from the '50s and '60s. At first, it was a modest success, and while it echoed throughout radio stations during the Christmas season over the next two decades, its true popularity showed with the rise of digital platforms, according to Gary Trust, Billboard's Managing Director of Charts and Data Operations.
"Once streaming really kicked in the mid 2010s, we've seen the song be so huge every year," he says.
Loading...
"All I Want For Christmas Is You" has gone on to become a success on nearly every platform, including social media, but if you take streaming data on Spotify as an example, it's striking to see just how dominant Carey's hit is, compared to challengers, whether old or new. Year after year, "All I Want For Christmas Is You" beats out predecessors like Wham's "Last Christmas" and Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" and holds off newer songs like Michael Buble's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me."
Since its release in 1994, not one new song has come close to challenging "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Carey's hit is the youngest in the top 10 of Billboard's all time Holiday 100 list, in most cases by decades. No songs from the 2000s make the top 10. There has been a plethora of Christmas music released since, but audiences remain loyal to the classics. Is it a personal preference, or are there structural issues keeping new songs from entering the holiday music songbook?
Why is the Christmas canon so hard to break into?
In the 2020s, popular music is increasingly genreless, and most of the industry is organized around constant release cycles with rapid turnover. So why does the Christmas canon remain so reliable? There are two key factors, according to Professor Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music: time and nostalgia.
"That's why so many classics stay in rotation," Bennett says about what makes listeners' relationship with holiday songs different from the pop music we listen to over the rest of the calendar. "It isn't that new songs are bad; it's that they haven't existed long enough to feel timeless."
Those requirements create a high barrier to entry, even for major artists like Cher and Taylor Swift. Artists who release new Christmas songs in hopes of reaching Mariah-level replay royalty often fail to break through. Not because the songs don't connect, but because only so many tracks can persist in public memory before familiar favorites take hold.
In that sense, a Christmas song heard in the same contexts every year for a four-to-six-week window functions much like a "holiday object." Sociologist Michelle Janning, who studies holiday rituals and material culture, argues that such objects create continuity across time. She describes holiday decorations as items with "biographies," whose emotional significance accumulates through annual reuse. Christmas music operates similarly, becoming a backdrop to the season itself.
Nostalgia isn't unique to Christmas music. It's a common feature of popular culture and a tool musicians regularly deploy. This year, Doja Cat has drawn on the legacy of '80s greats like Sheila E., while Lady Gaga has revisited the sensibility of her own early-2010s work. Each summer, anticipation also builds around the "song of the summer," a seasonal hit meant to capture the mood of the moment.
Psychologists who study how music evokes memory have found that popular songs outside of the holiday context typically trigger memories tied to the specific summer, year, or moment they were encountered in. Unlike Christmas music, these songs exist within a system built for turnover: When the season ends, the cultural moment moves on, and the music is preserved as a marker of that unique moment in time instead of being revisited annually.
Christmas nostalgia, however, is cyclical. Sociologists like Janning who study ritual and collective memory argue that holidays rely on repeated cues and use of "objects" to create continuity across time. "Adding something new interferes with the dance people do every year [during the holiday season] ... the tug between remembering and forgetting," says Dr. Robyn Autry, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. As we near the end of this year's holiday season, we know that we're on schedule to vacuum these songs out of our collective awareness (at least until the season returns next year and listeners are once again subsumed into the Christmas industrial complex).
Love it or hate it, this yearly reckoning forces audiences to renegotiate their relationship with the same songs. Coupled with the advent of new listening platforms that have made re-playing these tracks even more accessible — and made it easier to track what we're listening to — Christmas music remains culturally bulletproof.
Sonically, the markers of Christmas music are easy to name: sleigh bells, major-key melodies and lyrics engineered to stir longing. "All I Want for Christmas Is You" engages with those conventions, albeit subversively.
"Carey is saying, 'I don't want all the Christmas things, because all I want for Christmas is you.' It's a declaration of love, a universal feeling," Bennett says. "But in saying that, the protagonist is dismissing all the things we associate with Christmas [the tree, the snow, the presents] while still naming them all."
In other words, part of the reason why "All I Want for Christmas Is You" earned its success is because the song is at once backward-sounding in its construction and contemporary in its framing. It shook up the holiday music landscape by demonstrating just how successful an original Christmas song could be — while setting a bar that no other song could reach.
How does the music industry keep the same songs on top?
Appearing on a curated playlist can be a key factor for any song's success. A song that appears on one of those playlists can get 10 to 50 million additional streams, with high positioning an additional multiplier. A song that sits at the top of a popular playlist can get seven times as many streams as the fifth song down on the same list, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
"Everyone wants to be as early as often as you can be in playlists, and we've seen that in recent years where this means a lot to artists," Trust says.
The value is even greater for a holiday hit. While the average song on one of the more popular Spotify playlists will stay on for up to 200 days, according to NBER, an average song on a holiday playlist can stay on for as long as six years, according to an analysis by Chartmetric.
Knowing the benefit of curated playlists, especially ones created by an internal editorial team, labels try each year to improve the positioning of holiday songs. In 2023, Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" got a push from its label for its 65th anniversary. For a couple of weeks, it actually dethroned Mariah Carey at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
Maintaining that position is lucrative for everyone. According to a Billboard report, "All I Want For Christmas Is You" generated an estimated $8.5 million in global revenue and publishing royalties for Carey and her label, Sony Music, in 2022 alone. But even for songs that can't hope to reach that height, there is still potential for annual income.
"It's a slow drip, drip, drip over time, but the payoff will set you up for life," says NPR Music critic Stephen Thompson. "A lot of pop stars release holiday music essentially, like putting money in their 401k."
When will a new song join the canon?
Even with the odds stacked against new songs, there are a few that have become staples of the season. "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande broke the top 5 of the Holiday 100 last season and Kelly Clarkson's "Underneath the Christmas Tree" entered the top 10. Both songs are currently in this year's top 10. It's been quiet so far in the 2020s; all of the new additions to the canon came out in the 2010s, and took years to appear regularly in Christmas programming.
"You're not looking for immediate headlines," Thompson says. "You're hoping that it catches on like decades and decades out."
That doesn't mean artists will stop trying. Sabrina Carpenter released an EP titled Fruitcake in 2023, with a Netflix special the following holiday season. Fruitcake is currently in the top 20 Christmas albums, between Burl Ives and Elvis Presley. The Jonas Brothers are attempting to replicate the formula this year, with A Very Jonas Christmas EP paired with a Disney+ holiday movie.
But even when contemporary artists use the power of visuals to imprint themselves on holiday history, they're still competing with established classics .
"Animated videos [came] out with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra from the '50s and '60s, putting a new spin with a cute little video," says Trust. "It's really a holiday film, and that's a way to make something a little bit fresher."
This year, there's a slate of holiday music released, ranging from new recordings from Brad Paisley to rereleases like Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a unique realm in popular music; these songs may vary in style, but they're linked by the same desire to bring listeners into a holiday spirit.
"You can have a twist on a familiar thing," Dr. Autry says, "but people want to hear that the world is still capable of sounding the way they remember it."
Copyright 2025 NPR