Mariah season is getting shorter.
Listenership numbers shows Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which had been expanding its measurable listenership into Halloween season, has this year retreated from its October ambitions and loosened its grip on November, according to data from music-tracking site Last.fm.
This data, which captures 20 years’ worth of the song’s listenership among Last.fm’s millions of members, shows the percentage of the site’s daily listeners who played Carey’s hit jingle on a given day.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” was mostly a December affair in the 2000s. It wasn’t until 2010 that the song began getting measurable November plays, and its October listenership only became a factor in 2018.
But listenership in the fall months took a hit this year, declining 35% from October 2023 to October 2024 and declining 22% from November 2023 to November 2024.
Carey penned the 1994 song when she was 22 years old, she wrote in her 2020 memoir “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.” In the book, she described releasing the album — at the time, her fourth — as a risk: “You just didn’t see Christmas videos on MTV back then.”
The album went triple-platinum the year it was released, selling more than 3 million copies in the U.S., and has since gone on to sell at least 6 million more copies or album equivalents.
And “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has inspired hundreds of artists to cover it.
Carey is currently on her “Christmas Time” tour.
