The Journal. - Mariah Carey on the Rise of Her Christmas Anthem

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

We are off for the holidays, but still have a great episode for this Christmas weekend.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. 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 like my ears tuned for those little bells that start the song. You know, 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. 109 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's 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, 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 Leinbach. Coming up on the show, the rise and big business of All I Want for Christmas is You. Seth and Riley's Garage Hard Lemonade, a delicious classic with a vibrant taste of fresh lemons.

The perfect balance of sweet and sour with a crisp, zesty edge. Welcome to The Garage, the place of refreshing hard lemonade. Available at the LCBO. Must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. 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 going to 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 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 Christmastime, 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 as a 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 Want for Christmas is You was the first song that I wrote and recorded for that album. So there's kind of a hagiography 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 stork christmas movie. 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. 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. There's this big drum beat and then these really propulsive verses that she sings. And I don't care about the present. I only need the present. 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. Do you sing along with her? I certainly hum.

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. Coming up, how Mariah's signature Christmas song became a smash success. DQ presents... Picture this. Picture the DQ freezer, home to all the Blizzard flavors of the past.

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you can look forward to new discounts throughout the aisles at Loblaws to get your essentials at great prices. It's your cue to stock up and save. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. 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. You know, 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.

And 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, 3 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'd 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. Like I wasn't sitting at home maniacally trying to make that happen. It actually happened organically all around the world. Fans really, really tried to make it happen for me for this 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 3 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. Blanc, 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 going 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 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. You know, 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 the whole year. 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, you know, Christmas art of any kind. And there's this whole kind of blizzard of revenue that's happening behind the scenes as we are streaming these songs and spending it 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. Mariah, 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 something for you on Tuesday.