In 2018 Mariah Carey breaks the record for reproductions on Spotify in a single day: 10.8 million of 'All I want for Christmas is you' on Christmas Eve
Madrid Christmas begins with Mariah Carey
One of the most profitable songs in history, surely, has been
Your song
.
Elton John has stated more than once that it took him 15 minutes to compose the piece
, confirming that sometimes it only takes a twist of chance, a moment of inspiration, to forge a successful career and amass a fortune.
Now, if the history of pop music tells us anything, it is that the public's taste is changeable and not very faithful, and that seducing a lot of people for a long time is an infrequent astral conjunction.
But sometimes it happens, and the song that best exemplifies this indestructible, nagging persistence in the 21st century is Mariah Carey's Christmas hymn.
It's been 15 years in a row that, arriving at these dates -so endearing-, the
merciless bombardment of bells and
doo-wop
melodies sounds
that enlivens the commercial radio, the skating rink, the shopping center and other public spaces decorated with reindeer.
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Composed in 1994,
All I want for Christmas is you
has generated, in sales of
singles
, reproduction rights, licenses and other areas of exploitation,
more than 60 million net dollars up to 2017
, which would be the equivalent of 10% of the fortune total Elton John.
Of what he has invoiced in the last five years there is no data yet.
And the most miraculous thing about this event is that the song does not seem to generate any kind of collective animosity: when December, we take it for granted that we will even have it in our soup and we accept it with
a mixture of sympathy and resignation, not with hatred
.
It is a balanced, happy song, not very invasive and that resists several listens in a loop with the same aplomb as
Toto's
Africa .
And, here goes another astral coincidence, it was also composed in 15 minutes.
In 1993, following the publication of
Music Box
, Mariah Carey was the best-groomed artist in Sony's catalogue.
She had just married the president, Tommy Mottola, and had crowned herself the queen of sensitive ballads, so when 1994 rolled around and with the hangover of the first million copies sold on her third album,
she indulged in recording a Christmas album
, something that in its context - emotionally dominated by
grunge negativity
- sounded sentimental, a silly immersion in kitsch.
Interestingly, the first
single
to be released in a commercial format from
Merry Christmas
was
Miss you most (at Christmas time)
, while
All I want for Christmas is you
circulated only as a radio promo, and took longer to hit stores as
a single
. , which
prevented it from entering the charts
that Christmas.
It came late but in the form of eternal return.
The song
came about as an improvisation
: while in the studio, Mariah Carey and producer Walter Afanasief began playing around with melodic ideas from a lyric sketch.
In a few minutes they already had the frame assembled.
They did not yet know that they had created a monster.
In a 2019 interview published in
USA Today
, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the hit, Carey explained that the lyrics were inspired by her childhood, in which Christmas was
an oasis of hope in the midst of a sad life
.
The singer grew up in a broken family in a mostly white Long Island neighborhood, where she fit in badly;
the song emerged from those memories, therefore, as an outbreak of happiness that sought to compensate for previous hardships.
"I never got to experience Christmas like other kids because we had little money," she explained.
Thus, it was proposed that no one would have sad holidays again.
Although in the 90s,
All I want for Christmas is you
was already among Mariah's most successful songs,
the real commercial explosion occurred around 2007
, when new channels of diffusion -at that time were Myspace and the embryo of YouTube- they allowed a wide and universal circulation of a song that fulfilled an emotional need: to generate the desired good Christmas feelings without having to resort to, for example,
Jingle bells
.
Since then, its appearance on the charts has been almost ritual: it
has 1.3 billion streams on Spotify
and has never dropped below the
Billboard
top 100 in 15 years;
for eight weeks of Christmas, spread between 2017 and 2021, it has been at number one, like professional tennis players.
This week, what a coincidence, he has once again returned to the top.
This is no longer a fashion, but an eternal cycle.
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