christmas music
Wham!’s 40-year-old hit “Last Christmas” continues to find new fans, and new chart accolades, as the evergreen tune reached a new peak recently on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, rising to No. 3 on the Dec. 14-dated tally. The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast recently caught up with one-half of the English pop duo Wham! – […]
12/19/2024
While decades-old classics tend to dominate the holidays, here are 25 relatively new seasonal songs that have connected with listeners.
12/19/2024
Sabrina Carpenter collects her second top 10-charting effort on the Billboard 200, as her holiday set Fruitcake reenters the Dec. 21-dated tally at No. 10, prompted largely by its wide physical release on CD, vinyl and cassette on Dec. 6. It joins her chart-topping Short n’ Sweet in the top 10, as it holds at No. 5. Fruitcake had previously peaked at No. 121 in 2023.
Fruitcake cooks up a big reentry thanks to major sales – the biggest sales week for any holiday album in four years, and the largest sales week for a holiday album on vinyl in the modern era (since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991). Fruitcake also got a big promotional boost from the debut of Carpenter’s Netflix holiday special, A Nonsense Christmas, on Dec. 6.
Fruitcake was initially released in November 2023 as a digital download album for purchase and through streaming services. The next month, it garnered a limited vinyl release, exclusively through Carpenter’s official webstore. On Dec. 6 of this year, the album became widely available on CD, cassette and three vinyl variants (including one exclusive to Target).
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In the tracking week ending Dec. 12, Fruitcake earned 54,000 equivalent album units (up 1,040%) in the U.S., according to Luminate, with album sales comprising 39,000 (up 27,326%; it debuts at No. 4 on Top Album Sales) and SEA units comprising 15,000 (up 210%, equaling 19.65 million on-demand official streams of set’s songs). Of the album’s 39,000 sales – vinyl sales comprise 31,000 copies.
The last holiday set with a bigger sales week overall (across all formats, physical and digital) was when Carrie Underwood’s My Gift debuted with 41,000 copies sold on the Oct. 10, 2020-dated chart.
Previously, the biggest sales week in the modern era for a holiday set on vinyl came just two weeks ago, when The Philly Specials’ A Philly Special Christmas Party bowed with 22,000 vinyl copies sold (Dec. 7 chart).
Back on the Billboard 200, with albums at Nos. 5 and 10, Carpenter is the sixth artist in 2024 to have at least two albums in the top 10 at the same time. Previously this year, Zach Bryan, Future, Metro Boomin, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen all notched multiple projects in the top 10 concurrently.
Elsewhere on the charts, Fruitcake makes a sweet debut across multiple tallies: No. 1 on Indie Store Album Sales, No. 2 on Vinyl Albums, No. 2 on Top Catalog Albums and No. 4 on Top Album Sales. The set also zooms 47-3 (a new peak) on Top Holiday Albums.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. All Dec. 21, 2024-dated charts will be posted in full on Billboard’s website on Tuesday, Dec. 17.
Top Album Sales and Vinyl Albums ranks the week’s top-selling albums and vinyl albums, respectively. Indie Store Album Sales ranks the top-selling albums of the week at independent music stores. Top Holiday Albums ranks the week’s most popular holiday albums by equivalent album units. Top Catalog Albums ranks the week’s most popular catalog (older) albums across all genres, by equivalent album units.
The legendary Bing Crosby is back in the top 10 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for the first time in nearly 64 years, as his new holiday compilation Ultimate Christmas climbs 18-9 on the chart dated Dec. 14.
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The entertainer, who died in 1977, was last in the top 10 on the Billboard 200 with his classic Merry Christmas album, which ranked at No. 9 on the Dec. 31, 1960-dated chart. It had previously spent a week at No. 1 on Jan. 6, 1958-dated chart.
Merry Christmas became the second holiday album to top the Billboard 200, following its launch as a regularly published weekly chart in March 1956. Elvis Presley’s Elvis’ Christmas Album was the first chart-topping holiday set, as it topped the chart for three weeks in December 1957, moved aside for Crosby for a week and then returned to No. 1 for one more week in January 1958.
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Ultimate Christmas is available as 14-song standard album, an expanded 28-song edition, and a deluxe 58-song version. All versions of the album contain such classic Holiday 100-charting tunes from Crosby as “White Christmas” (featuring The Ken Darby Singers and John Scott Trotter and His Orchestra), “It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” “Mele Kalikimaka” (with The Andrews Sisters) and “Silent Night” (featuring John Scott Trotter and His Orchestra and Max Terr’s Mixed Chorus).
In the tracking week ending Dec. 5, as reflected on the Dec. 14-dated Billboard 200 chart, Ultimate Christmas earned 50,000 equivalent album units in the week ending (up 59%). Of that sum, SEA units comprise 46,000 (up 62%; equaling 61.37 million on-demand official streams of the set’s tracks; it jumps 16-6 on Top Streaming Albums).
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. The new Dec. 14, 2024-dated chart will be posted in full on Billboard’s website on Tuesday, Dec. 10. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.
The Philly Specials’ charity album A Philly Special Christmas Party makes a festive debut across Billboard’s charts, opening at No. 1 on Independent Albums; in the top 10 on Top Album Sales (No. 2), Top Holiday Albums (No. 2), Vinyl Albums (No. 2); and at No. 16 on the all-genre Billboard 200 (all charts dated Dec. 7).
It’s the third and final release in the charity series, presented by The Philly Specials (former Philadelphia Eagles football player Jason Kelce and his teammates Lane Johnson and Jordan Mailata).
Party arrives with the biggest sales week for any holiday album in four years, and the largest sales week for a holiday album on vinyl in the modern era (since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991). A Philly Special Christmas Party sold 32,000 copies in its first week (ending Nov. 28), with 22,000 of that sum on vinyl. The album was commercially released on CD, vinyl and digital download on Nov. 22.
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The last holiday set with a bigger sales week overall was when Carrie Underwood’s My Gift sold 33,000 nearly three months into its release, on the Dec. 19, 2020-dated charts. Previously, the biggest sales week in the modern era for a holiday set on vinyl was when Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack pushed through 20,000 copies in late 2022 (Dec. 31, 2022 chart date).
The new Party album boasts collaborations with the likes of Boyz II Men, Stevie Nicks, Mt. Joy and Jason’s brother (and Kansas City Chiefs tight end) Travis Kelce and includes covers of tunes like “Maybe This Christmas,” “Last Christmas” and “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units.
As for the rest of the top 10 of the latest Top Album Sales chart, the Wicked film soundtrack debuts at No. 1 (85,000), Kendrick Lamar’s GNX debuts at No. 3 (32,000), ATEEZ’s Golden Hour: Part.2 falls 1-4 in its second week (24,000; down 87%), Marilyn Manson’s One Assassination Under God: Chapter 1 debuts at No. 5 (20,000), Zach Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene re-enters the chart at No. 6 (18,000; up 14,517% after it was issued on vinyl and CD for the first time), Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet is steady at No. 7 (16,000; up 9%), ENHYPEN’s chart-topping Romance: Untold falls 4-8 (15,000; down 70%), Ice Cube’s Man Down debuts at No. 9 (nearly 15,000) and Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess rises 11-10 (13,000; up 16%).
Holiday music is one area of pop music where being dead isn’t a hindrance. A slight majority of the songs on Billboard’s Holiday 100, which relaunches this week, are by artists who have passed on. (The exact tally is 52 out of 100 – and six of the top 10.)
Several of the artists who provide the soundtrack to holiday specials, parties and trips to the mall have been dead longer than most of the current pop audience has been alive. Bing Crosby, who sang the Oscar-winning “White Christmas” in the 1942 film Holiday Inn, died in 1977. Elvis Presley, who gave us “Blue Christmas” in 1957, also died that year.
Vince Guaraldi, whose music for A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a part of every holiday season since that Peabody-winning TV special first aired in 1965, died in 1976. Judy Garland, whose “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has made us misty she introduced it in her 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, died in 1969. Nat “King” Cole, who introduced “The Christmas Song” in 1946 when he was fronting The King Cole Trio, died in 1965.
Crosby has seven songs on the current Holiday 100, more than any other departed artist. Cole is tied for second place with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams, with four songs each.
Holiday music has greatly extended these and many other artists’ era of relevance. Williams’ last non-holiday song to crack the Hot 100 was in 1976. Martin last charted with a non-holiday song in 1969; Crosby in 1957, the year before the inception of the Hot 100.
When it comes to holiday music, whether an artist is alive or dead doesn’t matter very much. In a way, that’s fitting. Family members who are no longer with us are still frequently part of our holiday traditions. You may serve your holiday dinner on your Grandma’s treasured china, or always make your aunt’s special cranberry sauce, or make a point of playing your mom’s favorite Johnny Mathis Christmas album. You may remember these departed family members when you say grace before dinner – or even bother to say grace at all because they would have wanted it that way.
More than any other time of the year, it’s a time for tradition. And music is very much part of those traditions.
Here are all the artists on the current Holiday 100 (dated Dec. 7, 2024) who are no longer with us. They are ranked in order of the current chart position of their highest-charting song, with other charted songs by the same artist grouped with them. Songs by duos and groups are included if the lead singer on that song has died. We also include the departed leaders of two mostly instrumental acts – Guaraldi, the leader of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, and Paul O’Neill, the founder, instrumentalist and composer of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. The year shown in parentheses is the year the song was first released by that artist. (Some were re-recorded by the same artist multiple times.)
George Michael
Michael Bublé’s blockbuster holiday album Christmas returns to the top 40 of the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart (dated Nov. 23), zooming from No. 72 to No. 35. Christmas is the first holiday album to reach the top 40 of the Billboard 200 in the current holiday season. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and […]
Jimmy Fallon’s first festive album, ‘Holiday Seasoning,’ debuts at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Holiday Albums chart and at No. 1 on the Comedy Albums chart (both dated Nov. 16). It’s the entertainer’s first album release since 2012. The star-studded set launches with nearly 13,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week […]
Finally! Mariah Carey was right on time on Friday morning (Nov. 1), ushering in the holiday season with her annual Christmas kick-off video. The Queen of Christmas officially declared that the countdown to the most wonderful time of the year had begun with her eagerly awaited “It’s Time” video.
This year, her Instagram post featured a video of Carey, 55, dressed as Morticia Addams from the Addams Family. The clip opens on a dark and spooky night, complete with a full moon, howling wolves and a steady rain falling on a haunted mansion. Cut to Carey in a sparkly black dress, a black wig and dark makeup taking the hand of a dancer dressed as Gomez Addams as they do the couple’s signature terrifying tango.
But after a few spins and dips, Mariah gives Gomez a hard push out of frame, tosses a dagger at his face — which narrowly misses her smiling beloved — and then gives a knowing look right down the lens and uses her mind to open a curious cabinet as the final calendar pages from October fly away.
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You know what was inside: Mariah’s red and white Santa jumper, of course. “IT’S TIME!!!!” Mariah wails in her signature whistle register from the seat of a sleigh filled with presents as the scene fills with fake snow, Gomez is transformed into a snowman and, of course, MC’s iconic holiday classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” blasts out.
The video ends with Carey smiling broadly as she and her reindeer prepare to take off in her sleigh. Carey had been teasing the launch of Christmas season for weeks, including dropping a “Christmas Time Set List” on Apple Music, unwrapping the cover art for four new “All I Want For Christmas” physical singles and, as always, posting a “not yet” video to make sure nobody jumps the gun on her favorite holiday.
Now that the skeletons needs to be packed away for another year, ’tis the season to crank up “All I Want,” because Carey is celebrating the 30th anniversary of her Merry Christmas album on the Merry Christmas Time Tour, which is slated to kick off on Nov. 6 in Highland, CA. Last year, “All I Want” topped the Billboard Hot 100 once again, marking the fifth year in a row that the holiday classic has topped the tally since first doing so in 2017.
Watch Carey’s “It’s Time” video below.
A new Spanish-language version of Brenda Lee‘s holiday hit “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” was released Friday (Oct. 25), using “responsibly-trained” artificial intelligence to make the translation. A perennial hit for 66 years and counting, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” is the biggest song to have been translated into a new language using AI.
Released via MCA Nashville/Universal Music Enterprises (UMe), “Noche Buena y Navidad” was revamped by four-time Latin Grammy award-winning producer Auero Baqueiro. Baqueiro first translated the lyrics from English to Spanish, trying to match the same phonetics and rhyming structure that made sense for Spanish while maintaining the original lyrical themes from the original English version. Then, he enlisted Chile-born, L.A.-based vocalist Leyla Hoyle to sing the vocals in Spanish in a way that would capture Lee’s unique voice patterns, including intricacies like phrasing, tone, and breaths.
Baquiero ultimately kept the original music and background vocals and, once Hoyle recorded the raw Spanish vocals, used AI to map Lee’s voice over Hoyle’s performance. The translation was made possible using SoundLabs AI’s MicDrop technology, a “responsibly-trained” AI audio plugin that allows users to swap their voices out with another voice or instrument.
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The new AI-powered translation arrives just in time for the holiday season. Despite being released back in 1958, Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is more popular than ever. Last year, her song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time and stayed in the top spot for three straight weeks.
Lee is not the first artist to use AI to translate her work. In May 2023, HYBE debuted a new K-pop artist, MIDNATT, who used AI to release his first single in six different languages. In November 2023, indie-pop artist Lauv released an AI translation of his single “Love U Like That” in Korean as a nod to his strong fanbase in that country. Similarly to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” a bilingual human songwriter, Kevin Woo, translated the “Love U Like That” lyrics to Korean. After Woo sang through the song, Lauv’s voice was planted on top of his vocals using the AI voice platform Hooky.
Finally, country icon Randy Travis made headlines in May 2024 by using AI voice technology to record a new single, “Where That Came From,” after his vocal abilities were greatly diminished in a near-fatal stroke a decade before.
The Spanish-language version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is the first release from Universal Music Group (UMG) and SoundLabs’ partnership, which was announced in June 2024. The AI company was founded by software developer and electronic artist BT and is said to be “responsibly” trained. The partnership is part of UMG’s “responsible AI initiative,” as laid out by the company’s CEO/chairman Lucian Grainge, which involves “forg[ing] groundbreaking private-sector partnerships with AI technology companies.”
“I am so blown away by this new Spanish version of ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,’ which was created with the help of AI,” said Lee in a statement. “Throughout my career, I performed and recorded many songs in different languages, but I never recorded ‘Rockin’’ in Spanish, which I would have loved to do. To have this out now is pretty incredible, and I’m happy to introduce the song to fans in a new way.”
“We are thrilled to work with Brenda Lee to making ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ the first classic song translated responsibly into another language with the power of AI, added UMe president/CEO Bruce Resnikoff. “We are also very excited about the possibilities of this emerging technology and look forward to harnessing its capabilities to introduce new material created by and approved by our artists.”
“The minute you hear Brenda Lee’s iconic voice on ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ you know it’s the official start of Christmas,” said UMG Nashville chair/CEO Cindy Mabe. “The global hit has touched people all over the world and kept this young 13-year-old spirit of Christmas captured in a time capsule. We are all so excited for this new Spanish version created with the help of AI from that legendary voice and approved by Brenda Lee herself to help celebrate this enduring, timeless classic.”