In the music industry, holiday music is the gift that keeps on giving — year after year. In 2020, as Dec. 25 approached, over 15 million people worldwide asked Alexa to play Christmas songs. Deep Dive looks at the biggest holiday hits of the streaming era, what strategies helped make them successful and how both online and brick-and-mortar stores are selling physical music products.
Read Billboard‘s 2019 Christmas Music Deep Dive here.
Let It Stream: The Label Holiday-Playlist Strategies That Keep The Clicks Coming
Holiday-music generates more than $170 million annually, and streaming numbers are so massive that labels now have year-round teams to keep the plays flowing. “Our hope is somebody’s going to discover our playlists by the holidays, put it on and just let it go,” says one major label exec. Read More
Michael Bublé
The Search For New Holiday Classics
At almost 2 billion streams, Michael Bublé’s Christmas has become that rare thing — a modern holiday standard — and a gold mine. Since 2011, Christmas has moved over 6 million equivalent album units and its songs have accumulated 1.9 billion on-demand streams in the United States, according to MRC Data. Read More
Kelly Clarkson
Kelly Clarkson, Michael Bublé and Mr. Hankey: What’s Selling (And What’s Not) At Brick-And-Mortar Music Stores This Holiday Season
Every fourth quarter, brick-and-mortar music retailers wish for a new, hot-selling Christmas album. This year, merchants say they’re betting that Kelly Clarkson will join perennial top sellers from Michael Bublé, Mariah Carey and Vince Guaraldi, whose soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was released in 1965 and remains a strong seller. Read More
The Top 25 Most Streamed Christmas Songs
A Majority of the Streaming Era’s Top 25 Christmas Songs Were First Heard On A Record Player
While record labels and retailers of physical Christmas music wait to see if one of this year’s new holiday albums will catch fire and drive sales by mid-December, industry sources say that this year’s Christmas-music streaming activity is off to a slow start. Read More
For more information on Billboard‘s “Unwrapping Today’s Christmas Music Market” special Deep Dive report, click here.
