The season of Christmas songs is here. Will the classics make room for anything new? : NPR

For the second week in a row, the top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are packed with holiday perennials … and Kendrick Lamar. With Christmas songs filling the entire top 5 — and Mariah Carey posting yet another week at No. 1 — you’d be forgiven for not noticing that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” has logged its first-ever week as the country’s top non-holiday single. Over on the albums chart, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department holds at No. 1.

Plus, with the usual holiday hits adorning the top of the pop charts, it’s time to dig a little deeper into the Billboard Holiday 100 and glean a sense of which recent-vintage songs have a shot at dominating the pop charts in future Decembers.

TOP ALBUMS

Last week, Taylor Swift reminded us that we are all just tiny insects toiling in a pop-cultural ant farm of her creation. When Swift feels especially motivated to maintain her hold at the top of the album chart — as she did for a run of nearly four months this spring and summer — she simply releases a string of discount-priced digital editions with new bonus tracks or live songs. And when she really wants to storm back to the top of the charts, she does what she did on Black Friday: release the first-ever physical copies of The Tortured Poets Department‘s 31-song The Anthology edition. Those CD and vinyl editions, which have been sold exclusively at Target, were enough to propel her back to the top of the Billboard 200 for a 16th and now 17th nonconsecutive week.

That leaves Kendrick Lamar’s latest, the surprise-released GNX, stuck at No. 2 for a second week in a row following its debut week atop the chart. With Lamar continuing to post three songs in the Hot 100 singles chart’s top 10 — an especially impressive feat, considering the logjam of holiday non-perishables spanning the entire top five — GNX is no slouch in its own right. But it’s hard to top an artist who refuses to budge.

With two immovable objects at the top of the Billboard 200, it might be easy to miss the latest data point in the mainstream embrace of K-pop music in the U.S.: Two K-pop albums debut in this week’s top 5 simultaneously. ROSÉ’s rosie — that’s the solo debut of the BLACKPINK member, whose Bruno Mars collaboration “APT.” has been a viral hit — enters the chart at No. 3, while the girl group TWICE hits the top 10 for the second time this year, as Strategy debuts at No. 4.

Sabrina Carpenter’s massive 2024 brings with it a fresh milestone of its own: She now has two albums in the top 10, as Short n’ Sweet holds at No. 5 and her 2023 holiday EP Fruitcake re-enters the Billboard 200 at No. 10. Fruitcake came out without a ton of fanfare last year — no surprise, given how much Carpenter’s profile has grown in the last 12 months — but is now benefiting from a fresh physical release, not to mention the singer’s newfound status as a household name and her newly released Netflix holiday special.

Rounding out the top 10 are juggernauts both old and new: The Wicked soundtrack dips from No. 3 to No. 6, Michael Bublé’s Christmas continues to leech all discernible emotions from the season while holding steady at No. 7, Bing Crosby’s Ultimate Christmas climbs from No. 9 to No. 8 and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft drops from No. 6 to No. 9.

TOP SONGS

Streaming has had countless effects on the way we listen to music, as well as on the way Billboard measures the success of songs and albums. The main issue with the latter lies in the way streaming algorithms feed listeners music they’ve already streamed before, creating a doom loop that sets an extremely high bar for any new music that might hope to crack, let alone top, the charts.

The Billboard charts consequently tend to produce a chaotic mix of volatility and predictability. In earlier eras, the Hot 100 would be dominated by songs you’d hear on the radio and/or buy as physical singles. But we now get charts where one album can load up the top 10 all by itself due to a high volume of streaming. (Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department locked down the top 14 songs on the Hot 100 in a single week this past spring.) And when holiday songs inevitably surge to the top of the chart, they do so in unnervingly predictable lockstep.

At this time 10 years ago, when streaming was far less widespread, the highest-charting holiday song was Mariah Carey’s then-20-year-old “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which jumped from No. 50 to No. 40. At this time five years ago, with streaming habits entrenched, that song hit No. 1 for the first time ever — and has returned to the top spot every year since. This week, it holds at No. 1 for a second week in a row, and a 16th week overall.

That 16-week run, spread out over the last six holiday seasons, has elevated “All I Want for Christmas Is You” into a four-way tie for the third-longest streak at No. 1 in chart history, behind the 19-week campaigns of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)” in 2019 and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” earlier this year. Incidentally, one of the three other songs with a 16-week run belongs to … Mariah Carey, whose Boyz II Men collaboration “One Sweet Day” blew away chart milestones back in 1995 and ’96 — and held on to the all-time record for more than two decades.

It’s one thing to be able to guess that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” will top the charts for a few weeks at the end of each year. What’s wild is how predictably the same four songs round out the remainder of the top 5. This week, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” holds at No. 2; that’s the song’s 13th nonconsecutive week at No. 2, all of them spent huffing Mariah Carey’s exhaust. Bobby Helms’ accursed “Jingle Bell Rock” climbs from No. 5 to No. 3 this week — a hard pill to swallow for those of us who’ve never once listened to “Jingle Bell Rock” voluntarily. Wham!’s “Last Christmas” dips from No. 3 to No. 4 and Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” jumps from No. 10 to No. 5. At this time last year? Those same songs lined up in the exact same order. In 2022? They were 5 of the week’s top 6 songs.

It’s worth noting, to provide a sense of how recent this phenomenon is, that just three holiday songs have topped the Hot 100 since its inception in 1958: “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (for three weeks during last year’s holiday season) and “The Chipmunk Song” by The Chipmunks and David Seville, for four weeks all the way back in December 1958. Other holiday mega-perennials, like Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” were massive chart toppers, but they predate the Hot 100 by years if not decades.

So here we are, in a timeline where five indomitable holiday classics tower over everything, and one of them is “Jingle Bell Rock.” Rounding out this week’s top 10 are familiar powerhouses of a different nature. Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” climbs from No. 9 to No. 6, making it the highest-charting non-holiday song for the first time in its 17-week chart run. Three songs from Kendrick Lamar’s GNX sit in the top 10 for a third week: “Luther (feat. SZA)” dips from No. 6 to No. 7, “TV Off (feat. Lefty Gunplay)” plunges from No. 4 to No. 8 and former chart-topper Squabble Up” slips from No. 7 to No. 10. And, finally, Shaboozey hangs in there for at least one more week of top 10 glory, as “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” slides from No. 8 to No. 9.

WORTH NOTING

In 2011, less than two years before Billboard began publishing a chart to reflect trends in streaming, the publication introduced a holiday-specific chart: The Holiday 100.

Because Billboard only publishes the chart for a few weeks each year, there have been just 71 individual iterations of The Holiday 100 in the chart’s history. And, astoundingly, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has topped the chart in 63 of them. But what’s almost as striking is that fully one-quarter of the songs — including more than half of the top 40, and all of the top six — have charted in each and every week of the chart’s existence.

So if you’re looking for new holiday music — fresh tracks to enliven the Christmas canon — it’s hard to find much of it on the Billboard charts, even with 100 slots to go around. In fact, right now there are a grand total of two 2024 songs on this week’s Holiday 100: Laufey’s “Christmas Magic” (No. 53) and a new version of “White Christmas” in which a long-dead Bing Crosby duets with V of BTS; both songs also skim the lower regions of this week’s Hot 100, hitting No. 79 and No. 93, respectively. (V and Park Hyo Shin’s new “Winter Ahead” hit last week’s Holiday 100 at No. 62, and hit No. 99 on the Hot 100, but it dropped off both charts this week.) A handful of other recent-vintage songs — such as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Santa Doesn’t Know You Like I Do,” from 2023 — pop up here and there, but they’re overwhelmed by aged chestnuts from the Andy Williamses of the world.

Last Friday, I went on All Things Considered to discuss why the Christmas canon is so heavily tilted toward older songs — and, more to the point, why we haven’t had a new colossal holiday hit since “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” from 1994. And one thing that came up briefly is also worth noting here: Would-be Christmas queens and kings have been lining up to take a shot at Carey’s throne — and, as it turns out, a handful of their recent songs have been slowly gaining steam.

For every Michael Bublé or Andy Williams who gets dethawed every Thanksgiving, there’s a contemporary pop star whose holiday song is edging ever closer to admission into the holiday canon. Some have made a tradition of going big on the holidays, like Kelly Clarkson, whose 2013 hit “Underneath the Tree” keeps flirting with the top 10 every year. (It’s never risen higher than No. 11, but it leaps from No. 20 to No. 15 this week.) Ariana Grande’s 2014 single “Santa Tell Me” — another relatively recent-vintage perennial that’s never quite cracked the top 10 — jumps from No. 19 to No. 14. Given the chart success of Fruitcake this week, as well as her aforementioned Netflix special, Sabrina Carpenter would seem to be carving out a perennial Christmas lane of her own.

In other words, don’t assume that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is impervious to fading — or to serious competition for holiday supremacy. It won’t happen quickly, as the ongoing chart success of Perry Como suggests. But even on the Billboard charts, nothing lasts forever…

…except, it seems, for Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control.” This week, Billboard named it the No. 1 song of 2024 — a feat it accomplished through not only popularity, but also longevity. The track debuted on the Hot 100 all the way back in August 2023, spent 45 weeks in the top 10 this year and peaked at No. 1 in March. Still, even with 13 holiday songs ahead of it, it sits comfortably at No. 23.