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Every December since 2019, Carey’s “Christmas” has amassed streams, sales, and airplay so big, it’s pushed current, nonseasonal singles by the likes of Post Malone, the Weeknd, and BTS out of the way and gone to No. 1 among all hit songs. And the competition is glacial: On this chart, a track that’s 10 or even 15 years old is considered a “new standard.”įrankly, the Holiday chart is small potatoes for “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” As you might have heard, in recent years Carey’s Christmas classic has also been topping the big chart - i.e., the Hot 100, Billboard’s flagship all-genre pop chart. So it’s on the lower rungs of the Holiday 100 where you can observe the artists angling to be the next Christmas queen or king. It’s notoriously hard for any song to break into the Christmas canon, whether it’s a new composition or a reboot of an old standard. It’s enough to make you wonder why Billboard needs this thing at all.īut what actually has made the Holiday 100 useful in its nearly dozen-year existence is what it reveals about Christmas music habits when we’re not listening to “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Beneath the No. 1 spot is where things get interesting - where what you might call the “Bublé versus Bieber’ dilemma actually plays out.

In fact, in the 57 weeks the chart has existed ( Billboard brings it back each December for just five or six weeks it’s the Mallomars of charts), Carey’s chestnut has been No. 1 for 52 of them, or 91 percent of the time. Yes, that song.Īll these years later, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is still No. 1 on the Holiday chart, which Billboard doubled to 100 positions in 2013 and renamed the Holiday 100. Only 14 songs were less than a quarter-century old, and fully half of those young recordings were covers of standards and hymns, like Amy Grant’s “Winter Wonderland” or Josh Groban’s “ O Holy Night.” (Two of the covers were by Bublé.) That left just seven originals on the inaugural chart that were less than two decades old - and interestingly, two of those young originals were in the top-two positions: at No. 2, then-17-year-old Justin Bieber, with “ Mistletoe.” And at No. 1, a track that was exactly as old as Bieber himself, first written and recorded in 1994. On that first edition, dated December 10, 2011, the overwhelming majority was standards, from Bing Crosby to Brenda Lee. Holiday Songs launched with 50 positions. The Holiday Songs chart used the same methodology as Billboard’s venerable Hot 100, combining track sales, radio airplay, and song streams to determine the biggest merry-season hits. The same week Bublé’s album hit No. 1, Billboard launched a new holiday-music chart, one to track individual songs. What would have been the point? Standards are what Bublé does best - and back then, those warhorse songs drove the holiday-music market. The album was largely composed of standards, with the Canadian crooner wrapping his honeyed pipes around such mainstays as “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “Jingle Bells,” and “ A Holly Jolly Christmas.” There was only one original - a serviceable number called “Cold December Night” - and Bublé’s label Reprise didn’t even promote it as a single. Simply titled Christmas, the 2011 collection was an instant blockbuster, topping the Billboard 200 album chart for five weeks and selling 2.5 million copies in its first year.

#BILLBOARD 100 FULL#

Eleven years ago, trad-pop vocalist Michael Bublé released his first full album of holiday music.

Billboard 100