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Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about Jimmy Iovine’s “Pro tips for producing a hit Christmas album,” originally ran in 2019
As Christmas music compilations go, only two have stood the test of time: The first, 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, featured songs performed by the “Wall of Sound” producer’s stable of artists, including The Crystals, The Ronettes and Darlene Love. The second, A Very Special Christmas, is the 1987 collection of holiday tunes executive-produced by Jimmy Iovine before he went on to co-found and run Interscope Records; found with Dr. Dre (and then sell for $3 billion) Beats Electronics; and serve as the architect for Apple Music. The album was an extremely personal endeavor for Iovine — a tribute to his father, Vincent “Jimmy” Iovine, who loved Christmas and died in 1985 at the age of 63. In 2014, Iovine told Billboard that making the project “was the purest thing I’ve ever done.”
Stacked with the most popular artists of the time — many who remain popular and relevant to this day, including Madonna, Whitney Houston, Run-D.M.C., Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Sting, John Mellencamp, Chrissie Hynde and U2 — A Very Special Christmas, an A&M Records release, went on to sell some 4.7 million copies (when its RIAA double-platinum certification and post-1991 Nielsen Music numbers are combined). It also spawned nine more volumes — Iovine was only minimally involved in the second — that have raised over $100 million for the Special Olympics.
Given the initial album’s success — the lion’s share of its tracks continue to be holiday season staples on radio and streaming — Billboard Pro asked Iovine for his do’s and don’ts of producing a hit Christmas album. In the process, he talked about some of his all-time favorite Christmas songs (see carousel) and why they will always be part of his holiday-music playlists.
Do Use Top Talent “If you don’t want to make disposable Christmas music, don’t start with disposable artists. You’ve got to work with artists that are going to last,” says Iovine. “When I play Christmas music, I play Spector’s album, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Nat “King” Cole — the people that will be around forever.”
Don’t Do It for the Money “I made that album from my stomach and my heart. I didn’t give a shit what we did with the money. I just knew we were going to give it away. And no one — not A&M, not a publisher, none of the artists, not me — made a dime from that record. That’s why $100 million has gone to the Special Olympics.”
Do Be Original “If you are doing a Christmas album, you’ve got to come at it in a unique way. If you are going to take on Phil Spector producing Darlene Love singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” you’ve got to go with a male [singer], because you can’t touch it otherwise.” Hence, U2’s exuberant cover on A Very Special Christmas, which captures the longing of the original without copying it, thanks to Bono’s soaring vocals. Iovine says the song was recorded backstage in Scotland before one of the band’s shows “in a giant room with real echo — ‘our version’” of Spector’s famed Wall of Sound.
Don’t Fear the Corny “Some parts of Christmas are corny — and that’s cool. Over the top is good at Christmastime.”
Do an Album — Even If It’s a Compilation “A Very Special Christmas had a feeling behind it and an idea. There was supposed to be joy and a tug at your heart at the same time. It wasn’t made like, ‘Here’s 10 Christmas songs.’ It was made like one artist’s album.”
Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Sequencing “Today no one sequences anything, but when I was making albums, sequencing was almost as important as the songs. A Very Special Christmas is put together like that. The sequencing took forever. I pictured myself at dinner or at a Christmas party, and I would just play a song and ask myself, “Am I bored?” That’s why I opened the album with The Pointer Sisters. They came in and just killed ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.’ And then I went from there. What song comes next is very, very important. What makes a great DJ is he or she gets bored before you do and knows what to play next. That’s what’s missing in a lot of streaming today.”
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about how two former Billboard staffers produced the holiday hit “Christmas Rappin’” for then-up-and-coming rapper Kurtis Blow, originally ran in 2019. Since then, in 2020, Robert Ford passed away.
One groundbreaking Christmas hit didn’t just make the Billboard charts — it was produced by two former employees. In 1979, J.B. Moore and Robert Ford left the magazine to produce “Christmas Rappin’ ” for an up-and-coming rapper named Kurtis Blow. Released on Mercury Records, the single went gold, and Blow became the first rapper to sign a major-label deal.
At Billboard, Moore was an ad salesman who sometimes wrote music reviews, and Ford was a production manager who also wrote a column about R&B. They both knew that hip-hop represented the future of music — Public Enemy’s Chuck D has cited a 1978 article by Ford as one of the first mentions of the genre in a national publication. Even so, they didn’t get any interest from A&R executives in New York, so they took “Chrismas Rappin’ ” to Chicago-based Mercury Records, where John Stainze, a recent transfer from the label’s U.K. office to its West Coast operations, convinced Mercury that the song would recoup its costs (about $6,000, remembers Moore) in the United Kingdom alone.
“Christmas Rappin’ ” — a song “ ’bout a red-suited dude with a friendly attitude” — wasn’t originally intended to be a Christmas tune. Moore, who wrote the lyrics, decided to give it a holiday theme because labels like songs they can sell every December. “Christmas Rappin’ ” turned out to be one: It peaked at No. 53 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart in 1995 and at No. 35 on Hot Rap Songs in 1999.
“It took Mercury forever to realize how big it was,” says Moore, who with Ford went on to produce Blow’s landmark “The Breaks” and work with the R&B group Full Force. “I’m sitting here staring at my gold record that should be platinum.”
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of Billboard.
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about how Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” came to be considered a holiday song, originally ran in 2019. The story of the song is recounted in the recent documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song.
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” with its ambiguous, imagistic lyrics about sex and spirituality, was once described by Jeff Buckley, perhaps the song’s most famous interpreter, as “the hallelujah of the orgasm.” So how did an a cappella version by Pentatonix get to No. 21 on the Billboard Holiday 100 in 2018 — after peaking on that chart at No. 2 in 2016?
It’s just the latest twist in the ongoing story of what may be the world’s least likely standard, which originally appeared on Cohen’s 1984 album, Various Positions. The song only became iconic two decades ago, after John Cale’s version was used on the Shrek soundtrack and Buckley’s version appeared in a video VH1 made in tribute to Sept. 11 rescue workers. Around that time, it also began to be used in religious services, its Old Testament imagery and chanted one-word chorus offering a solemnity that seemed to fit weddings, funerals and various occasions in between.
Written by Cohen — a Jewish Buddhist — the song was first associated with Christmas in 2010, when Britain’s Got Talent sensation Susan Boyle included it on her 2010 holiday album, The Gift, which hit No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and on the Official U.K. Albums Chart. In 2015, violinist-singer Lindsey Stirling released a version that reached No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 21 on the Holiday 100 the following year; that same year, German superstar Helene Fischer included the song on her hit album Weihnachten.
Since 2016, however, the most popular version of “Hallelujah” on streaming services by far has been Pentatonix’s, which has been streamed 346 million times in the United States, according to Nielsen Music. “When people hear it,” the group’s Scott Hoying told Billboard in 2018 about the song’s staying power, “they feel something.”
Alan Light is the author of The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah.”
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of Billboard.
Since the business of holiday music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas seasons past. This piece, about a Hannukah compilation, originally ran in 2019.
Two years ago, Verve Forecast approached Grammy-winning music supervisor Randall Poster (Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Irishman) with a proposition: curate and produce a Hanukkah album. “I had just finished doing the soundtrack to the movie SuperFly with Future, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a great follow-up: Hanukkah,’ ” recalls Poster, who grew up celebrating the holiday. He started reaching out to friends and collaborators, “convincing them that I wasn’t kidding.”
But it wasn’t until longtime pal Jack Black sent in two recordings — one of which was actually a Passover song — that Poster felt he had the foundation for an album. “Jack gave us the substance, so everything [else] would feel like it was part of a whole.” The additional song ended up inspiring the title of Hanukkah+ (out now, and on vinyl Dec. 13), which boasts a mix of covers and original music from the likes of HAIM and The Flaming Lips.
Randall Poster
Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for SXSW
The market for Christmas music is massive. What was the strategy behind putting out a Hanukkah album?
It’s not an easy thing. It doesn’t have the built-in Christmas music collectors, so we talked about trying to have a longer view — there’s an evergreen quality to it. But also, making it available at nontraditional retailers, like all of the synagogue gift shops, and seeing if we can make contact with the built-in audiences that the various artists on the record have [helped].
How did you ensure it wouldn’t come off as parody?
Probably the most famous Hanukkah song at this point is Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.” That’s why I was searching for a spiritual component, which allowed me to approach artists who weren’t Jewish, who had no real sense of the holiday or the history. I tried to find balance, because I wanted to have some of that silly, joyful element.
Was it tough to get artists onboard?
It’s not an easy one where you can say, “Hey, let’s do ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’ ” and set the stage for somebody to just come in and sing. My hope is if this goes well, maybe next year we do another five songs and just add to it. One person that I really wanted to get — he said he would but just got caught up in the sweep of his new record — was Ezra Koenig.
Hanukkah+
Courtesy Photo
Why such fondness for Hanukkah?
It was always the fun Jewish holiday, really. And as far as the musical repertoire [went], “The Hanukkah Song” was pretty much the favorite, or “Dreidel Dreidel.” I had a sense of it being a musical holiday, though there aren’t that many to choose from.
What will success for the album look like to you?
To tell you the truth, I feel like it already is a success. For me as a Jew, it was important to focus on more of the spiritual component, and I think we’ve captured that. I’m waiting for my rabbi to hear it.
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of Billboard.
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top ten places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, about the changes in the music business that have made the genre so important, was originally published in 2019.
Five months ago, during the dog days of summer, Sony Music executive Lyn Koppe was already running a 15-person meeting to prepare for Christmas. It wasn’t her first that year, either. Koppe, executive vp global catalog for Sony’s Legacy Recordings, leads a team that every January begins planning how to promote the year’s holiday releases, as well as the company’s evergreen seasonal music. As the sun shone down on Sony’s Manhattan offices, which overlook Madison Square Park, the group tossed around ideas by phone with executives from TikTok and members of Mariah Carey’s management team on how to promote the 25th-anniversary reissue of Carey’s Merry Christmas. Someone from management suggested looping in Carey, whom Koppe says is “very hands-on” about marketing — “the look and feel, timing and strategy.” And, within minutes, the five-octave alto herself had joined the call to chime in on the best way to promote the reissue.
“I think there were a few jaws on the floor,” says Koppe, recalling her TikTok counterparts’ reaction to Carey’s cameo at the meeting. But there was a lot at stake: The singer’s iconic Christmas album has become an annuity for her and Sony, a blue-chip property in a holiday recorded-music business that was worth $177 million in 2018 in the United States alone, estimates Billboard.
Carey understands that even the most enduring albums need promotion. So Koppe’s team of music elves — which included executives from marketing, publicity, A&R and product management — worked with Twitter to create an exclusive video of Carey reading fans’ tweets about her holiday music. They created a video skit to go with an enhanced version of the album for Spotify. And by fall, they were promoting the Last Christmas soundtrack — which includes the Wham! single the movie is named after, as well as other songs by the late George Michael, who was the songwriter of the duo — and working to maintain the visibility of time-honored seasonal hits by Andy Williams, The Ronettes and Elvis Presley. “We make sure they’re not forgotten about,” says Koppe.
This year, at least, there’s little danger of that. For about a century, the business of Christmas music was defined by holiday purchases, which meant that hit recordings were enormously profitable the year they were released but didn’t generate much revenue after a couple of years. Few record stores stocked much older Christmas music, and terrestrial radio doesn’t pay to use recordings in the United States. But because streaming monetizes the ongoing consumption of music rather than an initial purchase, it has changed the concentrated business of Christmas music even more dramatically than the rest of the industry. These changes have also amplified the cumulative advantage of the classic holiday recordings that come up first in search results — whether typed in or voice-requested.
Although it’s hard to get exact figures for the holiday music business, the most popular recordings in the genre generate far more revenue than they did a decade ago. “Last Christmas” by Wham! sold 81,000 tracks in the United States in 2008 — and sold and streamed the equivalent of 706,000 last year, according to Nielsen Music. Older recordings are getting more popular, too: Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” the third-most-popular holiday recording of 2018, sold 52,000 tracks in 2008 and streamed and sold the equivalent of 839,000 last year. Overall, holiday music accounted for 0.89% of on-demand streams in 2015 and 1.11% last year — and during that time, the overall revenue from on-demand streaming rose from $1.57 billion in 2015 to $5.5 billion in 2018, according to the RIAA.
Most of this Christmas cash goes to a relatively small number of rights holders. Last year, the top 50 holiday recordings accounted for 35.3% of all holiday streaming, while the top 50 pop tracks accounted for just 12% of streaming in that genre. Half of the top holiday track streams go to the top 252 recordings, while half of pop streams go to the top 613 pop tracks. At the top, the rewards are considerable — the top holiday recording of 2018, Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” was streamed almost a quarter as much as the year’s top pop song. But the No. 100 holiday recording on streaming services was streamed less than 10% as much as the No. 100 pop track.
To get a sense of just how much streaming has changed this part of the business, consider that some of the most popular holiday recordings weren’t easily available on traditional CD albums a decade ago. The second-most-popular holiday song in 2018 was “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms, a 1950s country artist who aside from that track sold the equivalent of 1,000 albums, including downloads and streaming. Some holiday hits by famous artists weren’t even available on albums: Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” the Eagles’ “Please Come Home for Christmas” and Bruce Springsteen’s live recording of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” were issued as singles, though they’re all available now on compilations.
At a time when streaming is ruled by pop and hip-hop from the past two decades, the list of the top 100 holiday tracks is dominated by the original versions of classic songs, recorded by artists that younger listeners aren’t familiar with: Williams, Helms, Burl Ives (“Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” the No. 5 most popular holiday recording of 2018) and Gene Autry (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” No. 9). Helms’ version of “Jingle Bell Rock” is more than 12 times as popular as the second-biggest version, by Hall & Oates. Perhaps it is because holiday music is so associated with tradition, “I don’t know of a rerecording that outperforms the original,” says SiriusXM director of programming Jess Besack.
These songs are like blue-chip stocks: uncool but no less valuable for it. And they’re likely to grow in value, along with streaming revenue in general. “Christmas hits,” says Koppe, “are the gifts that keep on giving.”
Christmas music has been a significant part of the music business for as long as there has been one — and some of the same songs have been popular since the days of wax cylinders. The first known Christmas recording is “Jingle Bells,” cut by the banjo player Will Lyle in 1889. In 1905, Victor Records had a hit with “Silent Night, Hallow’d Night,” an English version of the German hymn “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” Thirty years later, Bing Crosby made the song an even bigger hit, which was included on the 1940 Decca compilation An Album of Christmas Music — the Now That’s What I Call Christmas! of the 78 rpm era.
Over the next few years, Crosby helped make Christmas big business. His 1942 recording of “White Christmas” sold 600,000 copies that year and 2 million in 1943, according to Crosby biographer Gary Giddins, and it is said to have sold over 50 million copies worldwide — making it the biggest single ever. That recording, plus another take on “Silent Night” and other songs, were released as the Crosby album Merry Christmas, a version of which is still in print today.
Rock changed pop culture, but singers like Presley embraced the season, too: The most popular holiday LP in the United States is his Christmas Album, which has been certified 17-times platinum in various versions. It includes a rendition of “White Christmas” that upset songwriter Irving Berlin so much that he asked radio stations not to play it.
As pop music continued to evolve, Christmas repertoire did too. Kurtis Blow’s “Christmas Rappin’,” released by Mercury Records in 1979, was the first rap single to go gold, with sales of 500,000 (see story, below). In 1987, Run-D.M.C. hit No. 78 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Christmas in Hollis,” which sampled Clarence Carter’s 1968 soul single “Back Door Santa.” Other holiday music sounded less like the songs on the pop charts: Producer Chip Davis’ new age project, Mannheim Steamroller, hit No. 50 on the Billboard 200 in 1984 with Christmas, and it went on to release 38 holiday albums that all together account for 21.6 million album-equivalent units.
Although streaming has boosted the holiday music sector even more than the overall industry, it’s harder than ever to score a Christmas hit that remains popular year after year. It’s one thing for a new tune to sell, or stream, in its initial year of release — but quite another to show up on the chart every year, like Carey does. “Getting a big hit with a new Christmas song is gold when it happens,” says Kevin Gore, president of global catalog at Warner Music Group (WMG). “But it’s not easy.”
Some acts score with new versions of classics: Pentatonix had 19 of last year’s 200 most popular holiday streaming tracks, and Michael Bublé had the second-most-popular versions of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” But the original recordings are usually far more popular, at least partly because streaming algorithms have turned their familiarity into advantageous positioning. “Original recordings, with years of thumbs-up and listens, definitely tend to rise to the top of our Christmas and holiday stations,” says Alex White, vp music programming and curation at Pandora.
That’s an understatement: Since most streaming services tend to recommend songs that are already popular, especially in response to general search queries like “Christmas music,” Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart has less turnover than the Supreme Court.
For hits that break through, though, the payoff can be extraordinary. Last year, Ariana Grande’s original 2014 track “Santa Tell Me” garnered 82.9 million streams, more than any other original holiday song released this decade. The second-most-popular was Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe,” also an original, with 58.5 million. Because streaming-service algorithms tend to reinforce popularity, a bit of luck and the right promotion could keep them high on the chart for years to come.
Even by the standards of pop music, holiday hits are unpredictable. Among this year’s candidates: Keith Urban’s “I’ll Be Your Santa Tonight,” which debuted on the Dec. 21 Digital Song Sales chart; the Jonas Brothers’ “Like It’s Christmas,” which reached No. 25 on the Holiday 100 when it came out and was streamed 12.7 million times in the first three weeks following its release; and Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm,” which debuted on the Dec. 21 Hot 100. All three are upbeat, with the cozy but celebratory feel of holiday classics. “The Jonas Brothers song captures the good feel of a modern Christmas classic,” says Jeff Moskow, head of U.S. A&R for the Now That’s What I Call Music series, who slotted it after Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on Now’s Christmas playlist on Spotify.
Even if a song doesn’t outlast December’s snowmen, it could still help the artist that recorded it. Holiday releases are an easy way to keep performers visible at the end of the year, which can only help merchandise sales. “It’s an always-on music business,” says Jay Gilbert, co-founder of Label Logic, a company that provides marketing services for labels and managers. “You need to keep your audience engaged.” And the popularity of Christmas movies means that holiday music often scores lucrative synch placements.
Sometimes, new Christmas songs that debut without much fanfare maintain their popularity surprisingly well. Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” peaked at No. 42 on the Hot 100 when it arrived in 2014 and improved to No. 33 in 2018. Similarly, Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” peaked at No. 78 when it was released in 2013 and rose to No. 44 last year. “I don’t know why some songs stick and some don’t,” says Moskow.
As in the rest of the music business, popularity depends significantly on playlist placement — for both new and old material. Consider “Driving Home for Christmas” by British musician Chris Rea, an original song he wrote that hit No. 11 on the U.K. singles chart in 1988. It took over a decade for it to become a Christmas staple in the United Kingdom, and it’s now on Spotify’s Christmas Hits playlist — even though Rea hasn’t had a song on a U.S. chart since 1990, and most listeners are probably unfamiliar with him. “A song like Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ is experiencing a lot more discovery than it would have in a different era,” says WMG’s Gore.
No one wants to leave discovery to chance though, even for established classics. So executives who don’t have stars like Carey to work with are getting creative. Warner made a video for a new recording of “White Christmas” by Bublé, and Universal Music Group’s UMe catalog division hired studios to make animated clips for nine of its classic holiday recordings, including Dean Martin’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and The Jackson 5’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
“We recognized that there’s an opportunity to develop and extend engagement with our holiday catalog to an underserved audience that primarily accesses music through YouTube,” says UMe president/CEO Bruce Resnikoff. So far, the 1.4 million YouTube views that Frank Sinatra’s “Jingle Bells” racked up in the three weeks between Nov. 4 and Nov. 25 represent a 220% increase over the same period last year.
To younger YouTube users, some of these songs may sound as quaint as the animation looks. But Christmas music has always been driven by collective nostalgia — listeners want a version of “White Christmas” just like the one they used to hear. “If a customer requests a holiday song simply by song title, they likely expect and enjoy the classic recorded version as a return,” says Karen Pettyjohn, senior music curator at Amazon Music.
The more customers enjoy those results, of course, the more likely streaming algorithms are to keep offering them. Which means that songs like Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” could remain popular as long as Christmas itself.
This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of Billboard.
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