Best Christmas song to re-enter the Billboard US Hot 100 in 2019

the smart speakers thing makes a lot of sense -- as a kid growing up, throughout the month of December we'd always have Christmas music playing throughout the house (Mantovani, the Nutcracker soundtrack, Mannheim Steamroller, Barbra Streisand, a few others I don't remember), and that was just what December was; then my sister and I got old enough that my parents stopped, I asked why, and was shown how much of a royal pain in the ass it was to get all of the speakers set up to play all of the CDs and fix the inevitable issues

So it turns out “The Holiday Season” is pretty cute. I have put it on my Christmas mix for 2019, which I will link to tomorrow probably.

surprised myself by voting for burl (tho there are many contenders). bing would take it if he'd made the cut yet, and the drifters' cover would tower over all options imo. but agreed that actually overall this is a pretty good lineup of songs - the public, given the chance, would clearly curate a better and less maddening lineup than most mall and radio playlists or cassette/CD christmas comps. all killer, no filler.

the molanphy article is great, certainly one of the best i've read from him for a while. i was surprised he didn't mention smart speakers kicking christmas streaming into the stratosphere in the past couple of years specifically, but otherwise it's a very thorough and insightful rundown

This blows my mind:

in the entire history of the Hot 100, there’s been only one prior Christmas song at No. 1—and it’s by three imaginary singing rodents. That prior No. 1 Christmas single was “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)”

This various artists compilation was a showcase for the stable of acts on Spector’s Philles Records label, from the Ronettes to the Crystals, and for Spector’s legendary Wall of Sound production style. The album was basically a flop,

The fact that it was released the day Kennedy was assassinated likely contributed to its floppiness.

here's a very informative billboard feature on the growth of the holiday music biz from the bing crosby days up thru today's nu streaming-era resurgence:

Although it’s hard to get exact figures for the holiday music business, the most popular recordings in the genre generate far more revenue than they did a decade ago. “Last Christmas” by Wham! sold 81,000 tracks in the United States in 2008 -- and sold and streamed the equivalent of 706,000 last year, according to Nielsen Music. Older recordings are getting more popular, too: Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” the third-most-popular holiday recording of 2018, sold 52,000 tracks in 2008 and streamed and sold the equivalent of 839,000 last year. Overall, holiday music accounted for 0.89% of on-demand streams in 2015 and 1.11% last year -- and during that time, the overall revenue from on-demand streaming rose from $1.57 billion in 2015 to $5.5 billion in 2018, according to the RIAA.

another article within the same series reports an amazon music rep's claim that requests for holiday music to alexa smart speakers have numbered 10,000 per minute since december 1st. (as yet another article on amazon's increasing involvement in the christmas tunes biz points out, while some requests are for specific recordings or artists, many are simply generic calls for 'holiday music' or similar.) moreover, many old chestnuts are being repackaged into what are essentially playlists, but presented to digital service providers as digital-only albums so as to appear on new release lists, complete with generic titles like best christmas songs 2019 evidently selected with similarly generic search queries and voice requests in mind.

on this week's hot 100, four of the chart's top ten are christmas tunes, with "all i want for christmas is you" repeating its turn at the top and "rockin' around the christmas tree" at a new personal best just under it. given that peak seasonal streaming will occur on christmas eve and day, next week's chart is sure to have even more holiday hits toward the top, with carey's almost certainly assured a third week at the crest. given that 24 christmas songs were on the hot 100 at the season's height last year, i'm gonna go ahead and predict at least 30 this year, with a new record amount within the top 10 (it was four at last year's holiday peak). since most of these will have to be in the top 50 to even be eligible to enter, about 60% of prime real estate on the chart will be occupied by these old evergreens instead of the newly-breaking hits that the chart was originally formulated to track.

in an interview last year, billboard's senior director of charts gary trust seemed to indicate a fairly unwavering commitment to current policy with respect to christmas music's eligibility for the hot 100. ("For most of the year, the chart is still going to be driven by absolutely current music. This is the time of the year when consumption habits fluctuate very wildly, and the charts should reflect that.") but part of me wonders whether voices in the industry will privately pressure billboard to change the rules to ensure that holiday music does not monopolize the charts every december -- it's not exactly a good look for current hits-in-waiting to be plummeting down the charts, or even prematurely banished to recurrency, when their actual week-on-week activity is the sort that would on a non-holiday week be reflected by a small upward movement.

guess we'll see! in the meantime, perhaps we'll be seeing this year's amazon exclusives (john legend's "happy xmas" and ellie goulding's "river") managing to effortlessly find themselves on the chart like last year's did.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

"all i want for christmas is you" and "last christmas" are both poorly written songs imo

didn't expect this winner

Mariah (25), Brenda (41) and Bobby (50) all re-entered the countdown this week, so tis the season. With "Jingle Bell Rock," I do wonder: does Mean Girls fandom have anything to do with its contemporary popularity (relative, that is--I realize that film is nearly 20 years old now), or has this song always been bigger than, say, any given version of "Silent Night" or "Frosty the Snowman" or anything like that?

I just learned via Andrew Hickey that “Feliz Navidad” was produced by the same guy who produced Surrealistic Pillow for the Jefferson Airplane.