Topline
Mariah Carey’s holiday classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” entered Spotify’s Top 3 this week, while the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy soundtrack A Charlie Brown Christmas entered the top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart for the start of the yuletide season—here’s how two Christmas hits stack up against each other.
Santa Claus and Mariah Carey perform during a pre-tape performance for NBC's Christmas tree lighting ... [+]
Key Facts
On Saturday, “All I Want” earned the number 3 spot on Spotify’s top 10 most listened to songs list, garnering 5,276,318 listens in a single day and the only holiday song to break the top 5.
On Friday, “All I Want” became the first holiday song in history to earn diamond status from the Recording Industry Association of America, passing 10,000,000 sales and 1 billion streams worldwide since its 1994 release.
The song hit number one status on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 2019 and did so again in 2020 and early in 2021, and last month it topped Billboard’s list of the 100 greatest holiday songs of all time.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, which accompanied the 1965 Charles Schulz TV special by the same name, topped Billboard’s list of the greatest holiday albums.
For the week ending Dec. 7, Charlie Brown was the 10th most-popular album on the Billboard Top 200.
In 2016, it was certified quadruple platinum, selling over 4 million copies, and in 2007 the work was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame.
Key Background
“All I Want” was released as part of Carey’s album Merry Christmas. She wrote the song fairly quickly after watching It’s A Wonderful Life. Like Carey’s song, Charlie Brown was recorded speedily, in just three hours. Executives for CBS, which Charlie Brown first aired on, were originally displeased with the special, given its anti-consumer theme and jazz soundtrack didn’t seem appealing to children at first. The soundtrack and the special would quickly become classics, and the song “Linus and Lucy” would become synonymous with the Peanuts gang.
Surprising Fact
Carey said that her favorite holiday movie growing up was A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Tangent
Fans of the Peanuts specials were briefly worried last year, when Apple purchased the rights to them. Instead of airing on TV, programs like A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Great Pumpkin and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving were only going to be available on Apple TV+. After outrage, the streaming service announced ad-free broadcasts of the special on PBS, and will be doing the same this year.
Further Reading
Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Makes History Yet Again By Returning To No. 1 (Forbes)