By Sammie Jones-
Maria Carey’s all I want for Christmas generates between $600,000 and $1 million in royalties for Carey every year, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
A 2018 report from Business Insider estimated she’d earned more than $60 million from the track alone, just a fraction of the $520 million across her career
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Mariah was 24 and her then-husband and manager Tommy Mottola forced her to make a Christmas album, and the Christmas hit took her just
ll I Want for Christmas Is You is one of the most popular festive songs of all time – and it’s an incredible 27 years old.
Carey, already had hits including Fantasy, Without You and Touch My Body, and in 2019, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, 25 years after its original release, thus breaking several records including the longest trip to number one.
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The following year, it also topped the charts in the United Kingdom for the first time, spending a record 69 weeks in its top 40 prior to reaching number one.
With an estimated sales of over 16 million copies, it is the best-selling Christmas single by a female artist, and one of the best-selling physical singles in music history.
By 2017, it had reportedly earned £45 million in royalties.
On December 25, 2018, All I Want for Christmas Is You set the single-day record for the most Spotify streams, with 10.82 million plays – and broke it again the following year with 12 million.
So if the song is being streamed more and more every year, how much money does Mariah actually rake in from it?
Mariah, 51, keeps the exact figure quiet, but it’s thought she makes £380,000 annually from the tune in the UK alone – meaning she could easily live off just that song.
Celebrity Net Worth calculated that she gets somewhere between £450,000 and £750,000 each December overall.
According to Business Insider, by 2018, All I Want for Christmas Is You had grossed Mariah a staggering $60 million (around £43.9 million) since its first release.
Last year, All I Want for Christmas Is You hit the number one spot in the UK charts, almost three decades after its first release.
The festive song had only ever reached number two in the Official Charts Company’s UK Top 40, despite its huge popularity.
Fans of singing sensation Mariah had been campaigning for her track to hit the big time, including Jeffrey Ingold, who was the face of the push, taking to Twitter to encourage music lovers to stream her song.
“No one deserves a UK #1 more than @MariahCarey and so I went on national television to talk about this historic moment & my festive queen!” he tweeted, sharing a clip of him on Channel Five news.
“I can’t even put into words how exciting it is,” he could be heard saying in the video.
I grew up not having great Christmases, I grew up wanting that thing you see on TV – everything is happy, it is snowing and everything is beautiful, but I had a dysfunctional family and a lot of issues about myself,” she told Waleed Aly on Australia’s The Project.
“After I wrote All I Want For Christmas is You, very early in my career, I started every year to be able to create what I wanted to do for the holidays,” she continued.
“I feel like I’ve grown up with it as well, which a lot of people have, so I used to listen to it and pick it apart and think, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s pretty good,’ because nothing comes close to the classic Christmas songs that I grew up loving, but I have to remember that a lot of people have grown up loving this one.
“I have to be thankful for it. It comes from a real place, a place of longing and it’s pretty celebratory,” Mariah concluded.
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