What makes ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ so popular 30 years later?
Every year, the catchy tune with the opening bell chimes and tour-de-force delivery re-enters charts worldwide in the weeks before Christmas. Whether you’re indoors or outdoors, the enduring track is unavoidable during the holiday season. The music industry and mainstream media have covered the cultural impact and reasons for the timeless, classic quality of a festive hit that famously took 15 minutes to write. There’s even a movie and a book based on the iconic melody. But what does science have to say about the song that stands the test of time? Two academics from Northeastern University in the United States offered explanations.
Fond memories
“There are many reasons why songs stick,” explained Psyche Loui, associate professor of music and psychology. “There are certain melodic properties, pitches … or rhythmic properties … that make music particularly sticky. There’s also more psychological reasons for why some melodies are more memorable. Maybe they remind us of previous happy experiences.” “It opens with Mariah at her diva-esque best,” added music and communication studies professor Murray Forman. “She hits notes that other people can’t. She’s got such a fluid kind of vocal that stands out right at the beginning. But then it becomes like a 1960s girl group hit (with piano and that girl group vocalization). The very aesthetic of the song is structured on the one hand showing this is Mariah at her peak and then we go to something that’s super familiar, recognizable and catchy as hell that a lot of people in the 1990s would be familiar with.”
Forever young
“There seems to be this time in your adolescence where it’s an opening of a sensitive window for memorable experiences,” continued Assoc. Prof. Loui. “If you’re in your 70s and you’re thinking about music that you’ve heard anytime in your life and trying to listen to songs that are particularly memorable or emotional to you, chances are you’ll pick songs from your adolescence.” “Music from childhood is kind of a warm and fuzzy blanket,” she commented. “It’s a bit of this positive autobiographical memory.” The birth of the internet in the 1990s and music streaming in the decades that followed have led to renewed success for the single. In 2022, it broke for a fourth time the all-time record for the most streamed song in a single day on Spotify with 21.2 million global streams. It became the first song in history to be streamed more than 20 million times in a 24-hour span. “I think that’s part of the secret of how something endures,” Prof. Forman concluded. “You get this cross-generational appeal. (It’s incorporated) into each new generation, integrated into their traditions, which then becomes part of their nostalgia.” Love it, hate it, or just fed up with it, this Christmas song is an immutable fact of life at this time of year. Happy listening!
Keywords
Christmas, Mariah Carey, song, music, holidays