When it comes to Christmas songs, there can only be one – and that's Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You. In what's becoming something of a celebratory tradition, it's been announced that Mariah's song has broken Spotify's single-day streaming record, a record previously set by… Mariah Carey.
According to TMZthe song was streamed 23,701,697 times on Spotify on Christmas Eve, breaking last year's record of 21,273,357 streams. That, in turn, broke the previous year's record, which broke the previous year's record, which broke the previous year's record.
However, Mariah didn't quite get it her way this year: For the very first time since her reign of tinsel terror began, Carey's song hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for a week in the run-up to Christmas. by Brenda Lee, to whom Carey sent a bouquet of congratulations.
I wanted to embed the video below, but let's be honest, you've probably heard it enough this year. Here's Christopher Lee doing a metal version of Little Drummer Boy instead.
How Much Money Does Mariah Carey Make From Christmas Streaming?
Spotify doesn't publish details about how much it pays artists per stream, so we have to turn to third parties who make educated guesses, known as guesses, based on what they think the royalty rates will be. Reports indicate that Mariah is estimated to have earned between $4.3 and $7.8 million in royalties from Spotify alone.
When you include other royalties from radio plays, CD sales and so on, The Associated Press suggests All I Want For Christmas's revenues will top $100 million this year. And of course, Mariah isn't alone at 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 Christmas song, Wham's Last Christmas, has 1.2 billion streams; Third place goes to Santa Tell Me by Ariana Grande, with 906 million. Those numbers pale in comparison to the world dominance of Taylor Swift, who reportedly had 110.43 million monthly Spotify listeners this month, but Swift's numbers cover her entire music catalog rather than a single song.