As the self-appointed Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey has been known to announce the holiday season with her 1994 hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” As soon as we hear those first sultry notes crackling through the PA system at the grocery store, we know It’s Time, like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of jingle bells.
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Carey has managed to make a pretty penny off of her almost 30-year-old song, mostly during subsequent holiday seasons where it has appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 every year since 1994. So, how much has she made from this song that is, arguably, her most famous?
In 2017, The Economist put out a report on Christmas in the music industry, stating that since 1994, Carey has made $60 million from the song alone. That’s a rough estimate of $2.6 million per year. Since 2017, she has made an extra $15.6 million on the song. In total, she has made roughly $75.6 million since 1994. Additionally, among the 13 most popular Christmas songs on Spotify—which had amassed 1 billion streams between them at the time—”All I Want for Christmas Is You” was responsible for 210 million of those streams.
The song was No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart from the 2019 to 2022 holiday seasons. It currently sits at No. 4 on the chart this year, but we’re only in the beginning of the Christmas season. There’s still time for Mariah Carey to reign supreme.
On November 1, Carey posted a video on X of herself using her incredibly high vocals to crack an icy tomb and release herself upon the world, declaring “It’s…Time!” She also attempted to trademark the title “Queen of Christmas” for herself in 2022, though while Carey’s fans may definitely think of her that way, there are actually two other Queens of Christmas to consider: Darlene Love—who performed her 1963 hit “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on The David Letterman Show for 30 years—and Elizabeth Chan, a full-time holiday performer who has already put out her own album titled Queen of Christmas. Carey eventually let her trademark application expire after Chan made comments about Carey attempting to “monopolize [Christmas] in perpetuity.”
“That’s just not the right thing to do,” said Chan in a statement per Variety in 2022. “Christmas is for everyone. It’s meant to be shared; it’s not meant to be owned.” Whether Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas or not, there’s no denying the holiday season has definitely made her very, very wealthy.
(Featured Image by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Maroon Ent)
