Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” cannot be stopped. Already one of the most popular songs of all time, and the source of more than $60 million in royalties for Carey, the song appears to be more popular than ever in 2020… The current success of “All I Want for Christmas is You” suggests another reason for the decline of the top of the pops. Perhaps listeners and music labels don’t care as much about whether music is “new” any more. Tim Ingham points out in Rolling Stone that music labels BMG and Universal Music Group both report that “catalog” (music that is at least three years old) is making up a larger share of their revenues.
In the physical music era, it didn’t matter to a music label if a person who owned a CD listened to each song once or a million times. It just mattered that you made the one time purchase of the album. In today’s streaming times, old songs maintain their value. A stream of a song released in 1994, like “All I Want for Christmas is You,” is just as valuable as a stream of a new one. This means record labels less of a reason to find a new holiday hit, and more reasons to promote your old favorites. Or, possibly, it’s just that holiday music has its own type of freshness—that once a year reemergence that evokes a certain kind of mood, especially during a year whose mood otherwise has been decidedly not festive.