There is no Christmas without “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, just as there is no Christmas without polvorones and “peces en el río”. These are the rules of Christmas and we are nobody to contravene these sacred laws of the holiday.
In what is becoming a tradition in every sense of the word, it has been announced that Mariah’s song has broken the record for most streams in a day on Spotify, a record previously set by… Mariah Carey.
According to TMZ, the song was played 23,701,697 times on Spotify on Christmas Eve, breaking the previous year’s record of 21,273,357 plays. This, in turn, shattered the record from the previous year, which shattered the previous one.
However, this year Mariah didn’t get her way: for the first time since her reign of terror began, Carey’s song was surpassed in the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for a week before Christmas by Brenda Lee, to whom Carey sent a bouquet of flowers as a sign of congratulations.
How much money does Mariah Carey make every Christmas thanks to her song?
Spotify does not disclose details about how much it pays artists per stream, so we have to rely on third parties who make informed estimates, that is, guesses, based on what they believe royalty rates could be. Reports suggest that Mariah has earned between 4.3 and 7.8 million dollars in copyright royalties from Spotify alone.
If we take into account other copyright royalties from radio, CD sales, etc., Associated Press suggests that this year’s earnings from All I Want For Christmas… will exceed 100 million dollars. And, of course, Mariah is not just for Christmas: she is one of the most successful female artists of all time.
There is no doubt that Mariah’s 1994 song is far ahead of other festive favorites, with 1.5 billion streams to date. According to Statista, the next most listened to Christmas song, Last Christmas by Wham, has 1.2 billion streams; the third place goes to Santa Tell Me by Ariana Grande, with 906 million.
