Why do we hear the same Christmas songs year after year?

Why do we hear the same Christmas songs year after year? At the height of her career, Mariah Carey took a risk by releasing a holiday song. Given what we know about the singer who has dubbed herself "Queen of Christmas," and the ubiquity of the seasonal hit that earned her that title, it might seem crazy to think of "All I Want For Christmas Is You" as anything other than a holiday juggernaut. But back in the mid-1990s, Christmas music simply wasn't seen as big business. "It wasn't a known science at all back then, and there was nobody who did new, big Christmas songs," her songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff said to Billboard in 2014 . Carey already had a dozen top 10 hits by the time she released "All I Want for Christmas is You," many of them written and produced with Afanasieff. For their new song, they paired her pop diva vocals with production inspired by holiday classics from the '50s and '60s . At first, it was a modest success, and while it echoed throughout radio stations during the Christmas season over the next two decades, its true popularity showed with the rise of digital platforms, according to Gary Trust, Billboard 's Managing Director of Charts and Data Operations. "Once streaming really kicked in the mid 2010s, we've seen the song be so huge every year," he says. Loading... "All I Want For Christmas Is You" has gone on to become a success on nearly every platform, including social media, but if you take streaming data on Spotify as an example, it's striking to see just how dominant Carey's hit is, compared to challengers, whether old or new. Year after year, "All I Want For Christmas Is You" beats out predecessors like Wham's "Last Christmas" and Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" and holds off newer songs like Michael Buble's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me." Since its release in 1994, not one new song has come close to challenging "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Carey's hit is the youngest in the top 10 of Billboard 's all time Holiday 100 list , in most cases by decades. No songs from the 2000s make the top 10. There has been a plethora of Christmas music released since, but audiences remain loyal to the classics. Is it a personal preference, or are there structural issues keeping new songs from entering the holiday music songbook? Why is the Christmas canon so hard to break into? In the 2020s, popular music is increasingly genreless , and most of the industry is organized around constant release cycles with rapid turnover. So why does the Christmas canon remain so reliable? There are two key factors, according to Professor Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music: time and nostalgia. "That's why so many classics stay in rotation," Bennett says about what makes listeners' relationship with holiday songs different...

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