holiday music
After beating a copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Mariah Carey and other defendants say the little-known songwriter who filed the case must now repay more than $180,000 they spent on lawyers defending his “frivolous” arguments.
When a federal judge dismissed Vince Vance’s lawsuit last month – ruling the two songs mostly just shared “Christmas song clichés” – she sharply criticized the songwriter and his lawyers for “egregious” conduct during the case and ordered him to repay some of Carey’s legal bill.
On Wednesday, that bill came due: Carey and the other defendants in the case told the judge they spent a combined $185,602.30 paying a team of high-priced lawyers to work a total of 295 hours to defeat the “frivolous” motions advanced by Vance’s attorneys.
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If that sounds like a lot, Carey’s lawyers say its because Vance was making radical demands.
“The court should consider that [Vance was] seeking, among other things, $20 million in damages, injunctive relief, and even the destruction of all copies of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’” her attorneys say. “Considering such drastic requested relief, and the results obtained, defendants were perfectly justified in incurring the aforementioned attorney’s fees to successfully oppose plaintiffs’ motion.”
Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey in 2022, claiming “All I Want” infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He claimed the earlier track received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
“Carey has … palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance wrote in his latest complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”
Vance’s allegations were a big deal because Carey’s song is big business. The 1994 blockbuster, which became even more popular after it was featured in the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually, has re-taken the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earned a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022.
But in a ruling last month, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani said Vance had failed to show that the songs were similar enough to violate copyright law. She cited analysis by a musicologist who said the two tracks were “very different songs” that shared only “commonplace Christmas song clichés” that had been used in many earlier tracks.
“Plaintiffs have not met their burden of showing that [the songs by] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test,” Ramírez Almadani wrote at the time, using the legal term for how courts assess such allegations.
The judge not only tossed out Vance’s case, but also ruled that he and his lawyers should be punished for advancing meritless arguments that the judge said were aimed to “cause unnecessary delay and needlessly increase the costs of litigation.”
In Wednesday’s filing, the defendants told the judge how much Vance should pay under that order – saying they had been charged reasonable or even below-market rates from elite music litigators at top law firms.
Carey, repped by Peter Anderson and others from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, asked for about $141,000; Walter Afanasieff, a co-writer on Carey’s track repped by Kenneth D. Freundlich, asked for $7,000; Sony Music, represented by Benjamin Akley, Donald Zakarin, Ilene Farkas and others from Pryor Cashman, asked for $32,000; and Kobalt, repped by Bert Deixler and others from Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, asked for $5,000.
The judge will rule on the request at some point in the weeks or months ahead. Vance’s attorneys will be allowed to file a response disputing the calculation; they can also appeal the ruling dismissing their case, though such a challenge will likely face long odds.
Hit songs come and go — artists last. What lasts even longer, though, are Christmas songs, which stream every year — and generate revenue accordingly.
The biggest example is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which reemerges on the Billboard Hot 100 toward the end of every year — it has hit No. 1 annually since 2019 — heralded by a Carey video announcement that “It’s Tiiiiime.” How popular is it? It is the No. 16 biggest song of all time by U.S. consumption, a weighted measure of digital sales and streaming used by Luminate for about a decade. It is also the No. 42 song of all time in U.S. on-demand audio streaming.
The steadiness of the song’s popularity suggests that there’s a chance it could be the biggest hit of the 21st century, although it’s obviously impossible to know, or even figure out how such things might be measured in the future. There is a precedent, though. Bing Crosby’s 1942 recording of “White Christmas” is said to be the best-selling single of all time, with 50 million copies worldwide, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Is “All I Want for Christmas” emerging as a next-century successor of sorts?
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It’s possible. Most hits get big fast, stay big for a while, and remain big-ish for years, sometimes with a boost from an artist’s subsequent releases. Holiday hits get big every year and disappear like Frosty the Snowman, only to come back the following fall, as predictable as the holiday season itself. Carey released “All I Want for Christmas” as a radio single from her 1994 album Merry Christmas, but it didn’t hit the top 10 of the Hot 100 until December 2017. By then, the charts reflected rising streaming listenership, as well as radio play and decreasing sales. Streaming fueled the song’s rise to No. 1 in 2019 (for three weeks), then in 2020 (for two weeks), 2021 (three weeks), 2023 (two weeks) and now 2024 (three weeks as of the chart dated Dec. 28). It has now spent 17 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in total — the most of any song except Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” (featuring Billy Ray Cyrus), each of which occupied the top spot for 19 weeks. Unlike those songs, though, “All I Want for Christmas” may continue to hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 for years to come.
The list of songs with the most on-demand streams skews toward songs from a few years ago, since they have had a few more years to generate streams, and toward music that appeals to younger listeners, who were early adopters of Spotify and other services. Of the top 100, most of the songs came out after 2010, and almost all of them after 2000. The only older songs that have been streamed more than Carey’s are Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (No. 27) and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (No. 31), according to Luminate; the only other older songs in the top 100 are the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and, at 95, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
Like most holiday hits, “All I Want for Christmas” does well worldwide — especially in English-speaking markets like the U.K. and Canada, where this year it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100. It’s also popular beyond the Anglosphere: This year the song topped the German Top 100 Single Chart, as well as the Austrian chart and the Swiss chart, and its popularity is growing elsewhere. (At a time when Anglo-American recordings are losing market share to local-language music in most European markets, English Christmas songs still do well. For the chart week of Dec. 20-26, for example, nine of the top 10 singles on the Official German Charts were English-language Christmas songs.) “All I Want” is No. 48 on the songs with the most on-demand streams internationally, according to Luminate.
One reason for the song’s success is how much Carey leans into the song’s seasonal success. She is far more popular than any of the other acts with big Christmas songs: She has had 19 No. 1 Hot 100 hits, second only to The Beatles, with 20, and she has hit No. 1 in a record 20 different years. Some artists with that kind of career would blanch at the idea of being identified with holiday music, but Carey embraced it — to the point that she applied for a trademark on the title “Queen of Christmas,” albeit unsuccessfully. In addition to her annual video announcement of the season, now something of an event in itself, she does an annual Christmas tour, which this year included 18 arena shows. In 2023, “All I Want for Christmas” accounted for 23% of her streams, according to Luminate.
It’s impossible to predict whether the song will become the most popular of the century — or even how Billboard might measure such things by then. “All I Want for Christmas” certainly isn’t going anywhere: Its on-demand streams grew 15% and 8.3% in 2022 and 2023, respectively, according to Luminate, compared to overall on-demand streaming growth of 12.1% and 12.7%. But it’s also not gaining ground on the current on-demand streaming champion, Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower,” which had 333.12 million on-demand streams in the U.S in 2023, compared to 249 million for “All I Want for Christmas.”
Then again, holiday songs are nothing if not evergreen. For the past few years, the top four songs on Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart have been Carey’s, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Last Christmas.” Carey’s is by far the newest of the four. The second-biggest holiday hit, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 for three weeks last holiday season, was recorded in 1958 — 66 years ago. If “All I Want for Christmas” has the same kind of run, it could still be No. 1 in 2060 — whatever kind of listening that might include 35 years from now.
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
Holiday music is a big business. It’s also a big source of litigation.
When Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” stormed back to the top of the Hot 100 this month, it wasn’t alone. Each of the current top five songs are holiday tracks, with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” in second and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” coming in fourth.
All those streams make for some serious royalty money. Lee’s perennial classic earned nearly $4 million in 2022, and even lesser songs like “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” typically earn hundreds of thousands per year. In 2018, Billboard estimated that the entire Christmas music genre raked in $177 million in the U.S. market alone – a total that has almost certainly grown in the years since.
And where popularity and money go, lawsuits usually follow. As veteran music industry attorneys are fond of saying: “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ”
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With the holidays right around the corner, Billboard is breaking down the many times that Christmas music has ended up in court – from Mariah’s ongoing copyright battle over “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to Darlene Love’s fights with streamers to repeated courtroom clashes over religious freedom. Here are the five big cases you need to know:
‘All I Want For Christmas Is’ … A Copyright Lawsuit
Carey’s 1994 blockbuster is THE modern holiday song – now re-taking the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earning a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022. So it’s no surprise that she’s facing a lawsuit seeking a cut of that cash.
Starting in 2022, Carey has faced copyright infringement allegations from songwriter named Vince Vance, who claims she stole key elements of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his 1989 song of the same name. He claims that the earlier track, released by his Vince Vance and the Valiants, received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
“Carey has … palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance wrote in his latest complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”
Unsurprisingly Carey’s lawyers see things differently. In a motion filed earlier this year seeking to end the case, her legal team argued that the two songs shared only generic similarities that are firmly in the public domain – including basic Christmas terminology and a simple message that’s been used in “legions of Christmas songs.”
“The claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like “Santa Claus” and “mistletoe,” and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs,” Carey’s attorneys wrote at the time.
With Christmas now looming, it looks like Vance might be getting a lump of coal in his stocking: At a hearing last month, the judge overseeing the lawsuit said she would likely side with Carey and dismiss the case.
Good Grief: ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Sues Dollywood
Less than two months before Peanuts television producer Lee Mendelson passed away in 2019, his production company sued Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park – accusing the park of using the music from his “A Charlie Brown Christmas” without permission.
The songs of jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s legendary soundtrack to the 1965 television special, including classic originals as well as updated standards like “O Tannenbaum,” are firmly in the Christmas canon – and none more so than “Christmas Time Is Here,” which Guaraldi co-wrote with Mendelson.
In a lawsuit lodged in federal court, Lee Mendelson Film Productions Inc. accused Dollywood of using that song for decades in Christmas-themed theatrical production without proper licenses, calling it “willful copyright infringement” and “blatant disregard” of the law.
As is often the case in such lawsuits, Dollywood had secured a blanket license from BMI to publicly play millions of songs for its guests, but would have needed a separately-negotiated “dramatic license” to use it in a stage play: “Defendant knew from the beginning of its infringement that its performance license from BMI does not cover ‘grand’ or ‘dramatic’ rights,” the company wrote.
With a trial set to kick off in December 2021, both sides agreed to a confidential settlement that summer to resolve the case.
Concert Clash: Holiday Cheer or State Religion?
Do Christmas concerts at public schools violate the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state? It’s a question that’s been fought in court many times – and when a federal appellate judge weighed it in 2015, she didn’t miss the opportunity to sprinkle holiday references into her opinion.
For decades, Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana held an annual winter concert centered on an “elaborate, student‐performed nativity scene,” featuring religious songs (including “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head”) along with a narrator reading passages from the New Testament.
Unsurprisingly, after students and parents sued in 2014, a federal district court ruled that such an overtly Christian show violated the First Amendment and its ban on the establishment of a state religion. But when the school later made substantial changes — removing the bible readings and adding songs representing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among others — both the district judge and an appeals court said the new version of the show passed constitutional muster.
In her 2018 appellate opinion, Judge Diane Wood waxed poetic – saying that “since ancient times, people have been celebrating the winter solstice” and that the Concord High case put the court “in the uncomfortable role of Grinch.”
“But we accept this position, because we live in a society where all religions are welcome,” Judge Wood wrote. “The Christmas Spectacular program Concord actually presented in 2015 — a program in which cultural, pedagogical, and entertainment value took center stage — did not violate the Establishment Clause.”
Baby Please: Darlene Love Sues Over Her Voice
Before Mariah was the “Queen of Christmas,” that title was sometimes used for Darlene Love – and the original queen hasn’t been afraid to enforce her rights to her iconic holiday tracks “A Marshmallow World” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
Back in 2016, attorneys for Love filed a lawsuit against Google over allegations that the tech giant used “Marshmallow” without permission in advertisements for its Nexus smartphones. A few months later, she filed a nearly-identical lawsuit against cable network HGTV, accusing the channel of using “Come Home” in another set of ads.
Darlene Love photographed on November 14, 2020 in Spring Valley, NY.
Mackenzie Stroh
Those might sound like copyright lawsuits, but they weren’t. Instead, Love accused the companies of violating her so-called right of publicity by using her voice in the commercial, claiming that her voice was so well known that using the songs falsely implied she had endorsed those products.
“Defendant’s actions were despicable and in conscious disregard of Love’s rights,” her lawyers wrote at the time. “Defendant turned her into an involuntary pitchman for programs of dubious quality. Defendant created multiple commercials that falsely implied to the public that Love had endorsed HGTV’s programming.”
If successful, the cases could have raised difficult issues for advertisers who want to feature popular songs in their commercials — potentially requiring that they both clear the copyrights to the music and obtain explicit permission from any famous performers. But the litigation never got far: Love dropped her lawsuits later that year.
‘Christmas in Dixie’ Royalties Battle In Australia
When a singer-songwriter named Allan Caswell filed a lawsuit claiming that the country band Alabama had stolen key elements of their 1982 country hit “Christmas in Dixie” from his earlier song “On The Inside,” the case came with a twist: He wasn’t actually suing the band itself.
Instead, he filed his lawsuit against his own music publisher, Sony ATV Music Publishing Australia, for failing to collect royalties from the allegedly copycat song. According to an iteration of the lawsuit filed in 2012, the publisher’s musicologist concluded years earlier that the two tracks “shared a level of similarity” that went beyond a “random occurrence of sheer coincidence.”
But why sue Sony and not Alabama? According to Caswell, it was that the American band was also signed to another unit at Sony – and he claimed that his publisher was refusing to take action as a result.
“That’s the problem,” Caswell told a local TV station in Australia. “I’m signed to Sony ATV. Alabama is signed to Sony Music. So it’s all in-house. There’s no incentive for them to take action. They basically can’t take action because they’d be suing themselves.”
In 2014, an Australian judge dismissed claims by Caswell, ruling there was no evidence that Alabama frontman Teddy Gentry had ever heard “On The Inside” before he wrote his Christmas track. “I am satisfied that it is unlikely that he could have heard the plaintiff’s song by picking it up from the theme music of episodes of Prisoner,” the judge said at the time.
Jailhouse Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
If you were subjected to “constant” holiday songs for 10 straight hours every single day while serving a prison sentence, you might file a lawsuit too.
That’s what an Arizona inmate named William Lamb did in 2009, accusing Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (yes, that Joe Arpaio) of violating his constitutional rights with a non-stop slate of Christmas tunes at a Tucson correctional facility.
According to Lamb, the prison swapped out regular television programming in favor of “constant Christmas music,” which was played in the facility “continuously and repeatedly” from 9 am to 7 pm. The playlist included secular tracks like Elmo & Patsy‘s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and The Chipmunks, but also the Tabernacle Choir singing traditional Christmas carols.
In his lawsuit, Lamb alleged that holiday music marathons “forced him to take part in and observe a religious holiday without being given a choice,” violating the First Amendment. Arpaio argued back that the music served a secular purpose, aimed at “reducing inmate tension and promote safety in the jails” during a “difficult time of year for inmates.”
In a ruling just a week before Christmas in 2009, a federal judge agreed – saying the music served a valid non-religious purpose and didn’t primarily push religion on the inmates.
“Although Plaintiff asserts in his complaint that the purpose of the music was to force him to participate in a religious holiday, he does not explain how playing the music had a primary effect of advancing religion,” the judge wrote in the ruling. “To be sure, some of the music was religious, but the Supreme Court held [in earlier cases] that some advancement of religion does give rise to an Establishment Clause violation. A remote or incidental benefit to religion is not enough.”
Music Business Year In Review
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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 […]
Holiday music has exploded in popularity over the last decade as listeners hit play, again and again, on their favorite Christmastime songs on their favorite streaming services. The top 100 holiday tracks — track sales and on-demand audio streams in November and December — rose more than ten-fold from 2014 to 2022 compared to all-genre growth of 165% over those years.
But one group of songs has been left out of the holiday gold rush: religious songs.
Back in 2014, the top holiday song was Pentatonix’s version of “Mary, Did You Know?,” a song penned by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene in 1991 and originally recorded by Christian recording artist Michael English the same year. In the November to December holiday listening period, that recording of “Mary, Did You Know?” had 276,000 track equivalent units, according to Luminate — with 92% coming from download purchases.
In 2022, the top song was a secular one: Mariah Carey’s omnipresent “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which amassed 1.6 million track equivalent units in November and December. In 2023, both Carey and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” are on pace to do even better thanks to constantly growing streaming numbers and the artists’ heavy media presences. Universal Music Group Nashville’s campaign for Lee, which included making an official video and an appearance on NBC’s Christmas at the Opry television special, pushed “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” to No. 1 on the Hot 100 for the weeks ended Dec. 9 and 16.
In contrast, this year’s top religious holiday song, Pentatonix’s “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” ranks just No. 47. That lower ranking means fewer royalties from tracks and streams than the 46 secular songs in front of it. From Nov. 3 to Dec. 14, “God Rest” has only 19% of the track equivalent units of the No. 1 recording, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
The shift to secular holiday music has been abrupt. Pentatonix took the No. 1 spot in 2014 and the No. 2 spot in 2015, but by 2017, the top 10 holiday tracks were filled entirely with secular songs. Since 2018, no religious track has pierced the top 40. One of the top religious songs in recent years, Nat King Cole’s “O Come All Ye Faithful,” was No. 50 in 2022 and No. 46 in 2021.
Secular music’s command of the top 100 holiday recordings has widened over the last decade. In 2014 and 2015, 14 and 13 religious songs were among the top 100 holiday tracks, respectively. In each of the last three years, however, religious songs have accounted for only seven or eight of the top 100.
This change means religious songs have missed out on the recent financial bonanza. As secular songs dominate holiday listening, religious songs have won a smaller share of royalties. In 2014, 14 religious songs accounted for 83% of the top 100 holiday tracks’ royalties, according to Billboard’s estimate based on Luminate data. By 2022, seven religious songs accounted for just 4% of the top 100’s royalties. This year will have a similar disparity as only eight religious songs are currently in the top 100 holiday tracks.
Demographic shifts and the nature of popular holiday music suggest religious music will have a tough time making a comeback. As Billboard has reported, once a track becomes a holiday favorite, it gains a competitive advantage over other holiday tracks. That’s not to say a religious song can’t climb up the ranks in the coming years. But it takes multiple years for a new holiday recording to stick with listeners, and the young recordings with the most success — such as “Merry Christmas” by Elton John & Ed Sheeran and “Like It’s Christmas” by Jonas Brothers — are all secular. And with a declining Christian population in the United States to boot, it seems consumer sentiment is likely to match that trend, favoring songs about a special feeling this time of year over biblical themes.
The holiday season is a lousy time for new Christmas music. From one year to the next, the top of the chart sees little turnover.
During the last decade, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has been the top holiday song eight times, except in 2014 and 2016, when Pentatonix took the honors with “Mary, Did You Know” and a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” respectively. Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” are reliable runners-up. Of 2022’s top 10 holiday tracks, nine were also in the top 10 in 2021; six of them were in the top 10 in 2016. Reaching that region means outperforming some of the iconic recordings of the past 100 years, including Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Nat “King” Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” It’s tough competition.
This year, Jordin Sparks is hoping to nudge into the Douglas fir-scented scrum with a multiplatform approach to establishing a Christmas-season earworm. The American Idol season 6 winner recently signed with Epidemic Sounds, a platform that licenses royalty-free music to content creators, and released the four-track EP The Gift of Christmas on Nov. 21, which includes covers of “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Angels We Have Heard on High.”
Epidemic Sound acts like a record label by releasing the EP to digital service providers and getting tracks on playlists. But the most powerful distribution mechanism is its army of content creators that attract huge audiences. According to Epidemic Sound chief of music Niklas Brantberg, music licensed from the platform is heard 2 billion times daily on YouTube and 500 million times daily on TikTok.
Sparks’ EP is off to a good start. The songs on The Gift of Christmas have been used thousands of times and amassed nearly 10 million views to date, according to the company. In just two weeks, her cover of “Jingle Bells” became the best-performing holiday track ever released at Epidemic Sounds.
Sparks’ holiday branding strategy also includes a three-part seasonal decorating and home improvement video series, Merry & Bright, which is sponsored by Home Depot and will be shown on the video streaming interface built into 22 million VIZIO TVs. Katlyn Wilson, director of branded content sales and strategy at VIZIO, says Sparks “was the perfect host for this,” adding, “She has done Christmas content before. Hopefully, it will be a great way for her to continue to establish herself in the Christmas space.”
The Gift of Christmas is not Sparks’ first foray into seasonal music. She released the holiday album Cider & Hennessy in 2020, and two of its songs were featured in the 2021 Hallmark Channel movie A Christmas Treasure, which co-starred Sparks.
The Hallmark Channel is so important to the holiday music business that BMG, Downtown Music Publishing, Kobalt Music Publishing and Seeker Music partnered with the cable network for songwriter camps in 2023. Hallmark executives clued in the creators to what they look for when licensing music. “So far, we’ve had five placements from that camp,” says Mariana Migliore, director of creative synch at BMG — two of them by HunterGirl, the runner-up on season 20 of American Idol. “The Hallmark Channel will promote [the songs] on their SiriusXM channel and Spotify playlists,” she adds.
Other platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have followed Hallmark Channel’s lead and are getting more involved in Christmas movies. That presents an opportunity to get holiday music in front of large audiences that wouldn’t hear the music otherwise. “It feels like probably every other writer of ours is either an openly big fan of putting their music in that kind of project, or they are secretly obsessed with those projects,” BMG senior vp of creative synch Jonathan Palmer says. “It becomes like a bucket-list item for them.”
Exactly 65 years ago, Ross Bagdasarian‘s “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” — a novelty song featuring weird, high-pitched voices augmented in a recording studio — kicked off what would become the multimillion-dollar Alvin and the Chipmunks brand. Three weeks after its Dec. 1, 1958, release, the track topped the Billboard Hot 100, then went on to win three Grammy Awards and sell millions of records.
“They were born from a No. 1 song, which is unusual for most cartoon characters,” says Ross Bagdasarian Jr., whose father — the creator of Alvin, Theodore, Simon and their long-suffering host, David Seville — died in 1972.
The potent holiday-season earworm evolved over the decades into a cartoon empire, encompassing blockbuster films and their soundtracks, animated TV series, Taylor Swift-style re-recordings, one platinum-selling album (the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie soundtrack), one gold-selling album (the Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel soundtrack), concerts, musicals and dozens of branded toys, blankets, party favors and video games. Beginning with 2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks, the four theatrical live-action Chipmunks films have grossed a combined $656 million, according to Box Office Mojo. “It wasn’t just that it was a song,” says Bagdasarian, who, with his wife, Janice Karman, produced the films and voiced some of the chipmunks. “It created characters and personality.”
The senior Bagdasarian had been shrewd enough to initially retain all the rights to the shockingly lucrative holiday tune: master recording, publishing and product licensing. (He relinquished the master rights in the late ‘60s.) Billboard estimates the holiday track that started it all brings in $300,000 in annual revenue for the master recording and publishing. It has racked up 112.4 million total on-demand U.S. streams, more than half of which have come in November-December of the last five years, according to Luminate. Last December alone, the track streamed 10.4 million times. Plus, “The Chipmunk Song” has sold nearly 665,000 digital tracks, according to Luminate, and Bagdasarian says the Chipmunks have sold 50 million albums in their history, from 1965’s Chipmunks A Go-Go to 1980’s Chipmunk Punk.
Along with Karman, Bagdasarian — who has a law degree from Southwestern Law School — runs Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Bagdasarian Productions, which they started in 1981. Early on, the couple intended to make original films and shows, but they moved in the Chipmunks direction with Chipmunk Punk.
“And here we are, almost 50 years later, trying to come up with the next new idea for Alvin and the Chipmunks, from TV shows to movies to another TV series that we just finished last year,” says Bagdasarian, 74, in a phone interview marking the song’s 65th anniversary.
What do you hear in “The Chipmunk Song” that nobody else does?
I am pulled back to 1958, with my brother and sister and I being called into my dad’s den, where he would record these demos before he went into the studio to do a more polished version. We would hear not only the charm of the song but the personality of Alvin, talking back to him, as only a four-or-five-inch tiny chipmunk could do to a large man. Parents understand how frustrated and exasperated Dave would be with Alvin, and kids love identifying with Alvin because he’s got that spunk and that sass and he’s not afraid to go, “Hold on a second.” Just that little rebellious, mischievous nature.
Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
CBS via Getty Images
How much did Alvin empower you to be more rebellious as a kid?
I was more of the Simon character. Very dutiful. I was the one [who] really wanted my dad to be proud of me. So if there was a chore to do, let me wash his car or something. My younger brother Adam was the rebellious one. But I think he might have been rebellious on his own. I don’t know if he needed any prompting from Alvin.
Your family owns the entirety of the rights to the song — publishing, recording, licensing, etc. Right?
Yeah. True.
How did that come to be?
My dad was one of the first folks — you’re talking about in the ’50s — that not only owned the publishing rights to the song but he also owned the master itself. That was something that no artist was really doing back then. And Berry Gordy [Jr.], when he founded Motown, he had mentioned over the years [in private], “Well, when I found out that Ross Bagdasarian could own his own masters, I went from writing songs for people to developing a record label so I could own those masters, as Ross Bagdasarian had done.”
I didn’t realize the connection between your dad and Gordy.
Yeah. In the late ’60s, when he had decided he had done everything with the Chipmunks he wanted to do, he gave back [to] then Liberty Records, now Capitol-EMI, the phonograph rights to those masters. But he retained for himself — obviously, we still own these master-recording rights for movies, television, toys, commercials. The one area that we don’t control the master recording is simply in the phonograph-recording area. Which obviously is not what it was 10, 15 years ago, when you could actually really sell a lot of albums. “The Chipmunk Song” is still a wonderfully valuable song.
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So if anyone streams “The Chipmunk Song,” the master royalty goes to Capitol-EMI, now owned by Universal Music Group, not to your family?
That’s right. Fortunately or unfortunately, these days, 8 billion [plays] on Spotify would still amount to 17 cents. So it’s not a payment we actually miss. [Editor’s note: 8 billion Spotify plays would amount to about $38 million, according to Billboard’s royalty calculator.]
The most important revenue is in licensing songs for movies, the movies you make as part of the franchise, and publishing — right?
As far as the song is concerned, that is fair to say. The song has probably sold 20 million records, maybe more, because it sold 4.5 million records in the first seven weeks back in 1958.
Does your family own all the publishing — publisher share and artist share?
Yeah. My wife and I.
What do you remember about what your dad taught you about the music business?
It wasn’t as much about the music business as it was just life lessons. The most important thing that my dad ever said [was], “Listen, your word is all you will ever really have.” Had he lived a little longer, he would have added a caveat: “Your word is your bond, but don’t expect that from everybody else that you meet.” We’ve had times when we’ve made what we thought were various deals with record companies, only to have them say, “If you don’t have it in writing, you don’t have it.” They didn’t get that part of the story that my dad told me, evidently.
Want to give examples?
No! [Laughs.] I don’t think I want to. But they know who they are.
Any final thoughts about what it’s like to hear “The Chipmunk Song” everywhere this time of year?
Honestly, I am so thrilled every time, because it brings back my dad. I get to hear his voice.
Ed Christman contributed to this report.
It’s not often that an artist’s debut LP consists entirely of Christmas songs – but James Fauntleroy is no ordinary artist. Nearly a decade after the release of the original Warmest Winter Ever, the three-time Grammy Award-winning R&B singer-songwriter is making his formal debut as a lead solo artist with The Warmest Winter Ever. The steamy new project compiles the first two Warmest Winter projects with 10 brand new songs perfect for a sultry Christmas between the sheets.
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The announcement of The Warmest Winter Ever comes exactly one week after Fauntleroy picked up his sixth career Grammy nomination. Recognized in best progressive R&B album for his bossa nova-inspired Nova collab album with Terrace Martin, the nod marks Fauntleroy’s first Grammy nomination as an artist. The acclaimed musician has won four prior trophies thanks to his writing contributions to Justin Timberlake’s “Pusher Love Girl” and Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic (“That’s What I Like”; “Finesse”). That’s no small feat for someone who claims that “for the last 20 years,” they’ve “been telling everybody I’m not an artist constantly when they ask.” With more previously released music making its way to DSPs soon, Fauntleroy is set to truly step into his own as an artist – and he’s redefining holiday music as he swaggers down that path.
Filled to the brim with jaw-dropping harmonies and hilariously sultry wordplay, The Warmest Winter Ever finds Fauntleroy inviting his audience to expand their understanding of what holiday music can sound like. Why stop at “O Holy Night” and “Deck the Halls,” when you can croon “bring that s–t to Santa” to your special someone? The first two Warmest Winter projects primarily feature cozy, acoustic-forward arrangements, and the 10 new tracks broaden that soundscape into a wonderland of skittering bass and intimate a cappella joints. Take “Sleigh,” a tongue-in-cheek harmonic rhapsody that answers the question: What would it sound like if James Fauntleroy took “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and absolutely freaked it?
In a wide-ranging conversation with Billboard, James Fauntleroy discusses the making of The Warmest Winter Ever, why Mariah Carey is “one of the best writers in the history of man,” working with Beyoncé and the state of male R&B.
Billboard: What’s up with you, man? How’re you feeling?
James Fauntleroy: I’m excited, man! I’m happy and surprised that I’m still in the game. Appreciative, you know, so I’m feeling a lot of gratitude. I’m going from my first artist-led project — ’cause the jazz album, or I guess R&B album, was [with] Terrace — getting nominated for a Grammy to now my first album even though I’m damn near 20 years in the game. This is gonna be my literal first album, so I’m super excited. I’m a new artist. This is my gonna be my first project.
Why is now the time to bring The Warmest Winter Ever to DSPs?
We had a meeting this morning, [and] I found this old tweet of Rihanna posting about the first [Warmest Winter] project and because I knew it’d been out for a while, I did the math and I was like, Damn, this was nine years ago! The first project, I put out nine years ago, and I put out the other one sometime between then and now, and basically these projects are my first official releases.
I’ve been putting music out the whole time, [but] there’s one other project that I hear about all throughout the year, every year, even though it’s like 13 years old. This is one that all year-round people are telling me it’s July and [they’re] still playing the Christmas album. It’s so mind-blowing that music has the power to be something that people care or talk about after — especially now when s–t comes out and you switch your playlist up the next f–king day – a week. A big part of wanting to put these things on DSPs is just to show all my core fans appreciation because even though the s–t’s on SoundCloud, for whatever reason, they’re always like, Please put this on Spotify, please put this on Apple Music!
I’m just slowly starting to put all these songs on DSPs, but also give them something new, because another part of my compulsion to release is that while I do it because I love it and I get paid to do it, it’s also because I know so many people study me from them telling me and also from my ears. That was a big part of why I started my school called the 1500 Sound Academy. I also feel compelled to take it to the next level for people who I’ve inspired. A friend of mine [named] August 08 — he just got caught in the crossfire in the hood, a couple of [months] ago and passed away — I met him when he literally ran up to me in the airport and he was like, “Oh my God, I’m such a huge fan, I never even thought about making music until I heard your music and I got your album cover tattooed on my leg!” He opened up his jeans because they were already ripped and I didn’t even say nothing yet, and he said all of this. Then he went on to have success as a writer, got signed to Def Jam, had a song with Jhené Aiko.
I think about that kind of thing especially as the Internet and life and music go through growing pains. I’m always trying to think about maintaining the art form and pushing the envelope forward. Maybe everybody on Earth doesn’t listen to it, but if it gets to the right person and has an impact on them, then you know that makes it worth it. So those are all the reasons. And then I found the right team, honestly. Everybody thinks I’m trying to be mysterious, but really I’ve been waiting for the right time, the right platform, and the right team to put something out that is giving my audience the level of quality that they expect from what my music sounds like.
Does it feel weird having your first official solo album be a Christmas record?
No, it feels natural to me because when I’m thinking about it in terms of my legacy — not what I’m trying to build, but where I’ve come to at this point — I think that it’s so unusual to have your first album be your Christmas album, but considering all the s–t I make, it makes it the perfect first album. I’m always trying to find ways to express that there’s more, that you know that I’m different, that I’m doing something. As a writer — that’ll always be the core of what I’m doing — I love it because why I even started doing it was it was never about trying to f–king take a small percentage of that Mariah Carey money, which, oh my God, I’d love to have some of that, but it was really about finding new ways to tell stories. It’s just an opportunity to have a new topic; finding something new to wrap the art around is my primary method of coming up with new art. This project, it’s 25 Christmas songs, like, is it really 25 things about Christmas to sing about?! I don’t even know. [Laughs]. They’re all about Christmas, but they’re all so different from any Christmas music I’ve heard, so they’re doing their job of helping me push myself forward.
I had a lot of fun making all this s–t. It’s so fun to make music with no pressure. I produced, I think, every song on here. Maybe there’s like a few that I brought in some talented musicians, and there’s two songs with other people’s voices on them. I just had a blast doing what I wanted and trying to figure out how to do something different from what I have done in the past.
This record has some steamy joints on there. What inspired the sonic world of The Warmest Winter Ever, and what was it like to return to that place for a third installment?
When I’m thinking about where I want to draw inspiration from my projects, at its core, it’s all about drawing from references. There’s Stevie Wonder all the way up to the Timbaland-Missy s–t. There’s a bunch of different references technically. As far as the artistic inspiration, it’s less music and more film.
In the song “Neck,” you know, I’m imagining the movie Elf. “Christmas List,” that’s a song where I’m talking about picking up a gun, and that’s a different kind of movie. But then you also have “Miracle,” where in the second verse, I was thinking about The Santa Clause. I’m thinking about Black movies like Soul Food because when I’m thinking of a song, I’m doing a lot of visualizing, which is where I’m pulling a lot of the descriptive lyrics like, “She’s Grand Theft Auto 5 stars bad” — I was laughing while I wrote that. It’s really just trying to create a movie because that’s how I view music.
Sounds like you were in a very cinematic headspace. Any music videos on the horizon?
I have so many ideas! Do I have enough money to do all those things? Absolutely not. So it’s really based on how people respond to it. “Sleigh,” for instance, which is maybe my favorite song on the whole thing, is actually about imagining that Santa Claus worked at FedEx and he’s about to go out to do a shipment and he has Mrs. Claus with him and his manager or whatever, he’s like You can’t take this lady out. He’s like What?! If she don’t go in there, we ain’t going nowhere. This is how I do it. The message is about a relationship that empowers you and strengthens you and gives you the ability to do magic. If I could do a video, it would be UPS Santa with a real ultra-bad Mrs. Claus with her arms folded. [Laughs].
“Sleigh” is also one of my favorites. Talk to me about crafting your vocal arrangements and background harmonies? Who are you building on and emulating?
The goal of the song is the same as the goal of the arrangements, but the arrangements are the primary. The lyrics are really important, but those tend to hit you after the third or fourth listen. The first goal is to catch you with the arrangement and the music. My number one goal before streaming, but especially now, is you really need these motherf–kers to play that s–t more than once. My goal is to make a song that you want to hear again. What is the use of this song? How is this of service to people you know?
Typically, the use I’m aiming for is that it makes you feel good. It gives you an escape out of the moment you’re in, makes you feel good about yourself, and makes you think about something differently, it’s world-building.
On the technical side, there’s more and more s–t going on. There’s more and more parts coming in. I tell my students and people this all the time, I usually think about the different notes in the harmonies as different people. They’re different background singers, so sometimes I’ll pronounce what I’m saying a little differently. I might use a different dynamic. On “Sleigh,” I really overtly did it. In the second verse, the way I sang the first line and the way I sang the second line is two different people. The first line is all soft and pretty, and then the next one I’m singing three times louder. It’s just all these dynamics that I’m trying to turn your attention to.
Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask this since you do sing “Sleigh like Beyoncé” in the song, so have you worked with Queen Bey recently?
The last thing we did was that song with Nas and Jay-Z [DJ Khaled’s “Sorry Not Sorry”]. I sang the hook. That was the first song I ever put out that I didn’t write, actually. They sent that to me done already and just asked me to put my voice on it and [there’s] Beyoncé at the end which sounds epic.
As I was saying earlier about service, it’s really to make whoever is playing Beyoncé, the listener who is Beyoncé in that moment, have the opportunity to feel that. I’m always gon f–k with Beyoncé on whatever s–t she’s doing, but the idea came into my mind because of what she represents.
Since that Nas song, I’ve worked on some s–t for her, I’ll say. But nobody knows what’s coming out except for her, so I really have no idea.
The new tracks sort of depart from the cozier, more acoustically intimate vibe of the first two projects. Was that an intentional choice or was that simply where your heart was during the creative process?
No, it’s super intentional because if you listen to the first [project] and the second one, you can hear my progression as a producer because I’m just starting to take beats seriously. I love when I look back at these projects that they’re time capsules of where I was in that moment, what I thought was cool, and what my capabilities were. Literally, the first one, I’m playing the guitar and I don’t know how to play the guitar. [Laughs]. I’m also playing the guitar on this one, but it’s 10 years later. So I still don’t know how to play the guitar, but you can hear the growth.
What are some of your favorite original contemporary Christmas songs? How about the classics?
As far as contemporary — I can’t wait to hear [this one] because you asked me about harmonies and the core of all that is Brandy. Let’s just keep it real, that’s the basis of my style in general – I’m super excited to hear Brandy’s Christmas album.
I’ve heard some good Christmas rap songs over the years. I’ve heard some good contemporary [songs], but I’m trying to think of something other than this Brandy s–t. I think my favorite contemporary Christmas songs are my own. As far as my favorite classics, of course, Mariah Carey. I’ve had the pleasure of working with her a couple of times, and she’s always pretty upset that nobody acknowledges that she’s one of the best writers in the history of man. When I hear her snapping about that s–t, I’d be like You right, man. F–k that! because they is not putting nearly enough respect on this motherf–ker’s name. Not even close, bro. And then when I worked with her, I was like, Oh, [she] really does write? She’s not just an artist who wants to write to get the money, she’s an actual writer who can just sing her a– off. She’ll always be number one, literally and figuratively and philosophically.
I really love [Paul McCartney’s] “Wonderful Christmastime.” “This Christmas,” that’s a classic. The modern Christmas song Chris Brown put out called “It’s Giving Christmas,” I like that one too.
You just picked up your first Grammy nomination as an artist and your first Grammy nom this decade. How does that feel? Especially in relation to your career longevity?
Man, I can’t believe it. I’ll tell people all the time, that the typical lifespan for a person like me in the business, it’s like one to three years. Even for a big act, if you get one year, you did it. I’ve been doing this s—t for like 18 years. I was not expecting to get nominated for a f—king Grammy as an artist because I’ve been telling everybody under the sun for 18 years or however long that I’m not an artist. I am an artist, but I’m not a professional recording artist. It’s extremely exciting to still be in the game at all. A month ago, Saturday Night Live had a Donald Trump joke about “No Air,” and I’m like Yo, that was my first hit song!
For people to still give any amount of attention or conversation or anything for anything I’m doing is such a big deal to me because that’s the part that never gets old because they just don’t have to do that. That means it really had an impact on them. To be this late in the game and still have new achievements and new opportunities and new possibilities happening is really such an honor.
R&B has been in a great space lately with artists like Victoria Monét, Coco Jones and SZA killing it both critically and commercially. Where would you like to see the journey go next?
My hope is if you listen to SZA’s development over the years, it’s gotten to a quality level that I think is really admirable and respectable and serious – and still, she’s growing. Every genre experiences a point where it goes off of the tracks of the mainstream and it kind of turns into this isolated place where it can just develop on its own, and typically that means people pay attention to it differently. But it also means that the genre has the freedom to develop without the pressure of success, so the creators are not thinking about it like that.
R&B hit that point. I’m more really thinking about R&B as it relates to gospel because gospel music has been able to develop so much that you have — even since the ’90s, but from the ’90s till now — this gospel tangent that’s actually jazz. Kim Burrell‘s doing jazz s—t up and down, left and right. All these kinds of singers are, not just her, but like the whole genre of gospel that she started, it’s all heavily jazz-based. I feel like R&B went through a bunch of different growing pains trying to figure out what was going to happen when it wasn’t the Confessions era — that’s pop at this point, we’re only calling it R&B because Usher’s Black, but that’s another conversation. It was at the height, and then it experienced what every genre that reaches that level experiences, which is too many opinions from people who aren’t in it, because now it’s making so much money. When [R&B] went through the struggles it went through, it had an opportunity to evolve and I think what it turned into is gangster rap.
Future, Migos, Drake is the most overt because he’s actually singing, but that’s what happened to R&B, bro. It turned into gangster rap on one arm and it turned into [what] they call progressive R&B at the Grammys. But is that what is actually? It’s just the freedom that the genre is allowed when it’s not under the scrutiny of the machine to develop to such a point that it can focus on the quality. I think that that’s where we’re at. I think it’s been happening. It was happening the whole time, like when the industry stopped f—king with it, it didn’t go away. I really feel like what we’re going to experience going forward is a mixture of both.
Music has been going on in the industry since the 1920s and even though the hit songs have changed over the years, tempos, topics, whatever, the point of the music hasn’t changed. It’s to make people feel a certain way and these are the ingredients that I think are going to give us more diverse and more interesting forms of R&B going forward, and so I’m personally going to continue to put that s—t in my music and show as many people as possible that there’s more.
I named only women in my previous question because I wanted to dig into your take on the state of male R&B, specifically in relation to women’s dominance in the genre for much of the young decade.
They gotta start talking to women, bro. I can’t say it any simpler than Drake is the biggest n—a, and who is his demographic? Which of his songs are the best ones? Because he got a lot of songs talking to n—as, but which ones matter the most? Which ones make him Drake? It’s just being aware of who you’re talking to. I won’t name their legendary names — but I talked to a lot of legendary people about when it happened and why it changed and, basically, when gangster rap came in, they all started saying the same thing. Women were like “We don’t want that soft s–t no more.”
Still, women are having such a big impact on what men are doing. You have to look past the statistics. You have to look past what the data is telling you people want and think about first, who are you? They need to focus on what we know is right. Yes, you can make money giving people the world to escape into where they can be Scarface and be going extra hard on h–s and beating people up and killing them and s–t and that could be fun. But you could also just watch Taken. You’re not gonna get the same feeling out of your target, which is women. There’s two women for every man, and you’re not gonna get the same response out of a woman that watches Taken versus The Notebook.
I think that’s part of the reason why the male artists are struggling. We need more. It should just be who you are. And I think that’s really the issue with any modern artist, it’s like, Are you doing something that’s gonna matter? Are you doing something that’s going to set you apart? Or are you doing what you heard yesterday? Because in today’s world, that’s just not going to be acceptable. You don’t want to be a replaceable slot in the playlist to have a long career, so I think the R&B guys are figuring that out, but it’s going to be a process.
Looking beyond the holiday season – once the decorations are taken down – what can fans expect from you in the new year?
I’m about to really be an artist, bro. How else can I show the people [who] supported me and made my life into what it is, my appreciation? I put my full power, mind, creativity and energy into giving them what they’re asking for. I’m really about to be putting out music and doing shows — I just did the first show I’ve done in years at a jazz festival with Terrace singing some of the Nova songs a couple of days ago. It’s time. There’s some more music that’s been out that I’m gonna finally put on DSPs. I did a joint album with someone that I think people are gonna be really surprised and excited about, and it’s done. I’m really about to start giving everybody my interpretation of what albums should sound like in the world I’m trying to create and we’ll see how it goes, but I’m excited!
Here’s the full tracklist for The Warmest Winter Ever:
*previously unreleased
1. Unwrapped*
2. Bad Bad Bad*
3. Magic*
4. Bring That Shit to Santa*
5. Mrs Claus*
6. The Neck*
7. Miracle*
8. Christmas List*
9. Sleigh*
10. Nice Or Not
11. Body Heat
12. Spiritual Gift
13. Is It Morning Yet
14. It Rains Everywhere
15. Christmas Lights
16. Christmas Everyday
17. Christmas Everynight
18. Give You Love
19. The Present
20. Stocking Stuffer
21. Dreaming
22. Like Summer
23. Mistletoe ft. Maeta
24. Open Up
25. You Can Get It