Mariah wins Christmas again and smashes her own streaming record

When it comes to Christmas songs, there can be only one – and it’s Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You. In what’s becoming something of a festive tradition, it’s been announced that Mariah’s song has smashed Spotify’s one-day streaming record, a record previously set by… Mariah Carey.

According to TMZ, the song was streamed 23,701,697 times on Spotify on Christmas Eve, breaking the previous year’s record of 21,273,357 streams. That in turn smashed the previous year’s record, which smashed the one before, which smashed the one before.

Mariah didn’t get it all her own way this year, though: for the very first time since her reign of tinsel terror began, Carey’s song was beaten to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for one week in the run-up to Christmas by Brenda Lee, who Carey sent a bouquet to in congratulations.

I was going to embed the video below but let’s face it, you’ve probably heard it quite enough this year already. Here’s Christopher Lee doing a metal version of Little Drummer Boy instead.

Spotify doesn’t publish details of how much it pays artists per stream, so we have to turn to third parties who make informed estimates, aka guesses, based on what they think the royalty rates may be. Reports suggest that Mariah has made an estimated $4.3 to $7.8 million in royalties from Spotify alone.

When you factor in other royalties from radio play, CD sales and so on The Associated Press suggests that this year’s earnings from All I Want For Christmas… will top $100 million. And of course Mariah isn’t just for Christmas: she’s one of the best-selling female artists of all time.

There’s no doubt that Mariah’s 1994 song is well ahead of other festive favorites with 1.5 billion streams to date. According to Statista, the next most-streamed holiday song, Wham’s Last Christmas, has 1.2 billion streams; third place goes to Ariana Grande’s Santa Tell Me, with 906 million. Those numbers pale in comparison to the world domination of Taylor Swift, who had a reported 110.43 million monthly Spotify listeners this month, but Swift’s figures cover her entire catalog of music rather than a single song.