The Journal. - Happy Holidays! An Interview with the Christmas Queen

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Mariah Carey released "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in 1994 to moderate success. Today, the song is a megahit and Christmas playlist staple. What happened? WSJ's John Jurgensen called up the "Queen of Christmas" to find out. This episode was originally published on December 11, 2020.We'll return with something new on January 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Kate. It's that time of year again, so we're rerunning a holiday classic. It's about one hit holiday tune, how it came to be, why it endures, and what its success says about the larger forces shaping the music industry. The song in question? Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You. Enjoy. This winter, our colleague,

John Jurgensen has been living, breathing, and writing about Christmas music. One song in particular. I've had my ears tuned for those little bells that start the song. It might be in a car that's passing. It might be on TV. Certainly on the radio because my wife has Christmas music on repeat pretty much from Thanksgiving through January.

So I hear it a lot in my house also. That song is Mariah Carey's smash hit, All I Want for Christmas is You. I don't want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need. This song feels like it's everywhere this time of year. And the numbers back that up. It is the star on top of the tree under which all other Christmas song ornaments can't even

get close. So last year it got about 309 million audio and video streams. And by comparison, the second most popular Christmas song last year, which was Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, that old chestnut, that got about 193 million streams last year. All I Want for Christmas is so popular, it's easy to forget that it hasn't always been like this.

The song Surge to the Top of our collective playlist happened fast, and it actually happened pretty recently. John wanted to know why. The question I had was how a 26-year-old song that's been around so long and it's been part of the Christmas landscape for decades can have this kind of vault into ubiquity and also do so exponentially. We listen to Christmas music every year of all varieties. Why is this one heads and tails above all the rest? So John, who covers the entertainment industry,

went straight to the source and called up the queen of Christmas herself. Hi, Mariah. Hi, John. How are you? Great to see you. Great to see you as well. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leimbach.

Coming up on the show, the rise and big business of All I Want for Christmas is you. Courage. I learned it from my adoptive mom. Hold my hand. You hold my hand. Learn about adopting a team from foster care at adoptUSkids.org. You can't imagine the reward. Brought to you by AdoptUSkids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. So this is the first time I've actually spoken to Mariah. I've written about her in the past, but this is the first time I've ever got a chance to interview her.

John wanted to talk to Mariah about how All I Want for Christmas got so big. But the official reason for the call was her new project for Apple TV, Mariah Carey's magical Christmas special. There's clearly room for this Christmas business of yours to grow. Tell me what your priorities were for this year. Every Christmas, my goal is to be festive and to celebrate. And it's really, it's funny,

because when you said this Christmas business, I know that it's a business, but it really is a, I don't know how to explain it, except that I think I love it more than anybody. And I really think the special is gonna make people get in the Christmas spirit. And I can't create, like, festiveness for people. If they... I mean, I can try. I do try. But if they're not into it, I can't make them have as much fun as I can do with it.

But, you know. So, you were on a video call with Mariah Carey. Yeah. What did it look like? I mean, I think that Planet Mariah is a special place under any circumstances, but at Christmas time it certainly is much more extravagantly decorated. I go over the top. Yeah, it's an over the top thing.

I'm sitting here with Christmas trees in my house, like there's eight trees here, whatever. It's completely over the top. I only saw about four in the background of my video call, but I'll take it word that there were eight in the whole household. These days, Mariah Carey is all in on Christmas, but she wasn't always. John says when her label first pitched the idea of a Christmas album, she was skeptical.

This was in the early 90s when Mariah's fame was in full swing. So to put that into context, this was about a year after she released her third album, Music Box. Smash success, you know, this is an artist on the way up in every sense of the word. And so, especially at that time, Christmas albums, Christmas music was perceived as something that someone was going to do when they're over the hill. Because when I first did it, I was like, am I really doing a Christmas song right now?

This feels very premature to me. And I really have to say it was such a smart decision to do it and all I went for Christmas Is You was the first song that I wrote and recorded for that album. So there's kind of a hey geography around the song that doesn't really involve her co-writer. As the sort of history and lore of this song

has been recounted, she was tasked to write Christmas music. She was sort of sequestered in this house upstate, trying to put herself in the mood. And so in one room of the house, she had It's a Wonderful Life, the classic Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie playing. She had lights and sort of ambiance of the holiday sort of setting the mood. And she went up, as she recalls it, on this little crummy keyboard that she had available and started plunking out the melody for All I Want for Christmas is You. So she wrote the song.

I have to say, for all the times I've heard it, I never knew that she actually wrote it. Yeah, I think Mariah's fans love to stress this fact, but I think other people don't necessarily think about it enough, which is that she composed the song. She co-wrote the song, she co-produced the song, she created the song, essentially. Thinking about it, like there's been people

that said to me, you wrote All I Want for Christmas Is You? Like grown adults that assumed it was a remake, because that was the vibe I was trying to give it in terms of making the record in the first place and writing the song. And I think people forget because of Mariah's voice and her vocal talents and her kind of glam image, I think a lot of people forget that she's also a songwriter. How would you describe the song for those people who haven't heard it or those people who probably have heard it but didn't know what it was? The song is timeless in one way because it was written in the 1990s, but it's a throwback to the 1960s in some ways. This kind of Phil Spector wall of sound production style that was very unique to a time and place that many kind

of deem ageless and timeless. What I find unique about the song is that it's about four minutes long, but the first minute of the song, starting with those bells, is this sort of elaborate warm-up period where she's kind of getting us into the mood. Don't want a lot for Christmas Almost sort of warming up vocally and creating a little suspense and tension in the song. And that lasts for almost a full minute before what we know of the actual song

really starts to kick in. You There's this big drum beat and then these really propulsive verses that she sings. So there's this sort of buildup and suspense and then the rest of the song, the final three minutes, is all kind of payoff in her singing and the tempo and also the chorus of voices around her, which gives people listening ample opportunity to kind of harmonize with her and almost back up Mariah as we sing along with her throughout the song. All I want for Christmas is you

You, baby Do you sing along with her? I certainly home. Do you like the song? I do like the song. It's a great tune. And it's not saccharine. I mean, there's a lot of Christmas songs that I run the other way from.

I don't do that with Mariah's song. It's probably hard to pick a moment, but when you're performing it, what's the exact moment in that song that you love the most? I don't know that there is one specific note. I know that I would be doing, let's say, the Tokyo Dome, right?

Even in July, when the bells that begin the song, the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, when that would start, because it was always a very calm audience, like a different experience culturally, and then the bells came on. And it's like the place suddenly woke up even in the summer. It became this thing where you're like, wow, people really know it from the first bell. People might know the song from the first bell today, but it wasn't always a hit. Mariah's signature Christmas song became a smash success. All I Want for Christmas came out in 1994. It was a modest hit on its own terms. I believe the album itself went to

number three on the Billboard Albums chart. Not bad for a Christmas album. But the song was never marketed as a standalone single in the way we think about singles now. That seems surprising. Well, if you think about it, this is the 90s. This is pre-MP3s, pre-digital era. Most of us were not going out and buying individual singles

or EPs. We were buying the album. Many people did. And they would play it at home. And so there was no real metric, no real mechanism for that song to vault ahead of the rest. But in the early aughts, that started to change. Services like iTunes let people buy

All I Want for Christmas as a standalone single, and a lot of people did. Mariah and her label started putting more marketing behind the song. She did those Christmas concerts and specials. Then last year, 25 years after it first came out, the song hit number one. So I remember Christmas Day last year, I was sitting in Aspen in the house, three o'clock

in the morning, had seen the billboard piece. It was such a feeling of, not just a feeling of accomplishment, but also a feeling of content, like really feeling at peace, really feeling extremely thankful just for the moment and just taking a beat to enjoy it and to acknowledge it. Mariah gives credit for the song Surge to her fans. They've been organizing for years to vault the song to the top of the charts in 2019 and make it her 19th number one hit. They did it. I wasn't sitting at home maniacally trying to make that happen.

It actually happened organically. All around the world, fans really tried to make it happen for me as my 19th number one. But it wasn't just the fans. John says you can also trace the song's rapid rise to streaming. Starting around 2012, 2013, 2014 is when services like Spotify, Pandora really started to become default for a lot of us as music listeners. And really if you think about when the streaming era, as we know it, took hold, that's really in the last five years or so. And that's where you see the song jump

in terms of plays by an order of magnitude every year. In 2012, All I Want for Christmas had three million audio streams. In 2019, it had 166 million. And a lot of that growth came from playlists. So think of the fact that I decided to make a Christmas holiday playlist for my house when my family and I are decorating the trees, let's say. I'm going to put Mariah Carey's song on there. And so are a million other people who are making a holiday playlist because they know that song, they love that song, blonk, they put that on their playlist.

You also have the algorithms of a site like Spotify that are recognizing that that song is popular around Christmas. The algorithm says that's a smart song to be putting on our automatically generated playlists. So you have this kind of amplifying force around streaming that once a song is on that level it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It feels like streaming is giving a lot of older songs a boost. We've seen it this year with Dreams from Fleetwood Mac. Is this happening a lot? Oh yeah, I mean that is the coolest thing probably about the

streaming ecosystem. This kind of windmill of popularity gets rolling and often it can just be one thing. In that case it was a TikTok video that a guy made drinking cranberry juice and just kind of vibing out to that song and something about the way he loved it and the way it just sort of presented itself on TikTok just sent it into this kind of stratosphere of replays and views.

So bursts like that happen all the time, but there's a little bit different than what we're seeing with Mariah's song, which is kind of a seasonal version of that burst. Every time December rolls around and we add All I Want for Christmas to our holiday playlist, Mariah Carey, the song's co-writer, co-producer, and singer, gets paid.

So I'm with the Wall Street Journal, so you know I'm gonna ask you about money. If you want to give me to ask you about money. If you want to give me some, you can. Don't expect much from me. Don't expect much from me, darling, because I failed remedial math. Okay? We're not doing equations.

I know you're keeping track of that business. How much do you estimate all I want brought in for you last year? Oh, I have no idea. I have no idea. I know that it's like it like a billion streams or something at this point. I don't know. I know very little about all these details, believe it or not. Let's put it this way, not as much as it would have if we still had

physical CDs and such. She said, listen, I have no idea how much that song makes. But I also believe that she probably doesn't know how much that song makes. I think it's such a nebulous part of the business and kind of infamously hard to delineate in the music industry, which has been a real problem for a lot of artists. It's very hard to sort of track all the different strands of profitability for a song. Does anybody understand? I'm not doing this because it's like, oh, this is such a huge money-making opportunity. Yeah, we love that. Like you said, we love money. We can talk

about money. Yay. But I really do live from Christmas to Christmas. And I really do plan for it the whole year and work towards it. Mariah didn't give John a number, but he estimates these days the song makes at least a million dollars a year on streaming alone. But that estimate is low because it doesn't include other even bigger sources of revenue like radio play around the world and licensing, including for this podcast. When we think about money and the Christmas season, generally people are just thinking about retail.

Maybe that's because it's like the money coming out of our own pockets. But every time you hear any Christmas song, baby it's cold outside, jingle bell rock like all I want for Christmas is you. That's money going into someone's pocket. It's true and it's a fascinating thing that these songs and all kinds of copyrights, whether it's Christmas movies,

Christmas art of any kind, there's this whole blizzard of revenue that's happening behind the scenes as we are streaming these songs and spinning them every year. As for Mariah, she doesn't seem to mind just how large this Christmas song looms over her career. You know what? Yes, I'm always going to make other music. And of course, I love the emancipation of Mimi. We could talk about Butterfly all day long. There's lots of albums. The first album, whatever. But this whole Christmas moment for me is like, I don't know,

I'm really thankful. I was telling my friend the other day and I said, I'm just thankful that I wrote the song because it really does make me happy every year. All right. Such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate you. Merry Christmas. This episode was originally published in December of 2020. Spotify is one of the companies behind this podcast. As you know, the journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

Music in today's episode is by Blue Dot Sessions and of course, Mariah Carey. Thanks for listening. Happy holidays. We'll be back with a new episode on January 2nd.