Image by Peter Fowler
The 2018 holiday season is over, and the dust has finally settled on the huge impact of Christmas music on the charts. Christmas songs occupied 23 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the first week of January, only to fall off simultaneously and catapult a host of newcomers onto the charts.
Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You,” which rose to an all-time high of No. 3, smashed XXXTentacion’s single-day streaming record on Spotify, while classic artists like Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee, and Bobby Helms charted for the first time in years. Even Genius saw huge pageview spikes for classic Christmas songs.
As Billboard’s Senior Director of Charts Gary Trust explained to Genius in a recent interview, this phenomenon mostly comes down to the same trend affecting the rest of the industry.
“It’s pretty much just one word: streaming,” he said. “We’ve seen streaming gain so much over the last few years. We’re really seeing it with holiday songs, so this is a case where it’s not just hip-hop that’s proving it can be a streaming monster.”
Older songs have only been allowed on the Hot 100 chart in the last decade, meaning there’s a short history of comparison. In 2018, however, classic Christmas songs climbed higher than ever before, fueled by robust streaming activity. BuzzAngle’s 2018 year-end music consumption report revealed that on-demand audio streams were up 74 percent during the holiday season this year, with 110 billion streams in total.
Trust believes the increasing popularity of smart speakers linked to streaming accounts played a role, as Christmas songs became a go-to soundtrack for the season.
“It’s just so easy for someone who isn’t even that technologically inclined, who may not be a streaming person throughout the year,” he said. “It’s easy for anyone of any age [to say], ‘Alexa play me Christmas music.’ So we’ve seen a big uptick in the streaming of holiday songs. Amazon itself was a big driver of that list. Holiday music is a shared experience, probably more so than other formats.”
“All I Want For Christmas is You” led the way again, with BuzzAngle reporting that the song earned 187 million streams in 2018. The 1994 song has proven to be a modern Christmas classic, just as Carey intended.
“When I made the record, I was trying to make a classic sound record,” she said during her Genius Level appearance last year. “A lot of people think it’s a remake… I guess it should be flattering, because that was my goal. I didn’t want it to sound like something that was new.”
The song’s rise to No. 3 so long after its release isn’t unprecedented, although it stands among just a handful of tracks to make chart comebacks of such a magnitude. For Trust, it’s an example of the Hot 100 chart’s intention of “not ignoring when something maybe decades old is right there competing with newer music.”
Carey sat just a few spots above Bobby Helms' 1957 rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock,” Brenda Lee’s 1958 track, “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree,” and Burl Ives' 1965 song “Holly Jolly Christmas.” All three artists, long passed away, charted in the Top 10 for the first time in decades, showing the powerful force streaming can be for classic songs as well as new ones.
Although the sight of 23 Christmas songs on the chart may be odd, Trust thinks its an appropriate way to measure total industry consumption. “For most of the year, the chart is still going to be driven by absolutely current music,” he said. “This is the time of the year when consumption habits fluctuate very wildly, and the charts should reflect that.”
The only thing that hampers the future success of Christmas music is Billboard’s own rules, which dictate that older songs need to qualify for the Top 50 before they’re eligible to reenter the chart. “If we didn’t have that rule, it might have been another, I don’t know, 25, 30 [songs],” he said.
Trust explained that he anticipates the future performance of Christmas music on the charts to follow the fortunes of streaming as a whole. “It’s just the one genre that’s evergreen,” he mused. “Holiday music gets handed down and comes back every year. These songs really don’t burn out.” According to him, the idea that “All I Want For Christmas is You” could hit No. 1 next year isn’t out of the question at all.
“I wouldn’t say no to anything,” he said. “If Mariah can get to No. 3 this year, she’s certainly trending in the right direction, but I can’t predict the future other than streaming doesn’t look like it’s leveling off yet. I would say that’s her Christmas wish for next year.”
