Dominating radios
An ornament/pajama merchandise line.
Thousands of live shows.
Various covers
Even a very unneeded kids movie and book series.
The song is one of the highest grossing songs of all time and shows the power of Christmas music.
Best example of this being the highest selling single song in history.
White Christmas by Bing Crosby, released in 1942.
The song would sell 52 million copies and later Crosby would sell 30 million copies of top for Silent Night.
Amusing thing also learned is that Christmas albums tend to be a career entry point for musicians.
Taylor Swift did a Christmas album in 2007.
Ariana Grande in 2014.
Justin Bieber in 2011.
Even Mariah Carey could be argued in that category, seeing how her career only began four years prior with “Emotions” in 1990.
Looked at why so many artists do Christmas albums early into their careers and found the following.
Radio access
Traditionally every radio station regardless of genre wanted to have some Christmas content for the month of December.
Artist could get easy access & attention by having Christmas work, which would be aired during that 4-6 week period.
It’s basically a weird thing where every other song in the world gets ignored for a month and a handful of pieces dedicated to one holiday get attention. If someone has even something mediocre, it can get attention.
Public domain
Normally Christmas albums try for one original song and a bunch of covers of songs that have long been in the public domain.
It makes it so there’s very little work with handling contracts on rights and also little work coming up with originality to it.
Low cost/low effort
It was reported that “All I Want For Christmas” only has about 20 minutes of writing go into the original draft. Comparing that, the co-writer Walter Afanasieff who also wrote “My Heart Will Go On” spent months working on that.
Christmas songs are extremely simple and if people complain, they normally get the excuse of it being a Christmas song.
Even “All I Want For Christmas”, I think most people would call very mediocre as a song itself, but for Christmas music standards, it’s basically Stairway to Heaven.
Reason for writing this was honestly just amazed how much Mariah Carey personally pulled in on the song and how thanks to merchandise, books and more, it’s moved passed song into full on business.
Was also really blown away by how many artists have done Christmas albums and sort for the logic behind that.
It’s something that’ll keep on expanding from here and likely every upcoming artist that qualifies as some sort of Christian will roll the dice and hope for a Mariah Carey success for the rest of time.