Mariah Carey. Kevin Mazur/WireImage for MC
Mariah Carey is still making a ton of money on her iconic hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
According to The Economist, the track earned $60 million in royalties between its 1994 release and 2017, coming out to about $2.6 million per year. While figures aren’t available for recent years, the song still regularly tops the charts every holiday season, meaning that Carey, 55, likely still rakes in quite a bit from the track each Christmas.
Cowritten by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is also the first holiday single to ever earn the Diamond Award for reaching 10 million sales and streams. The music video also has about 750 million views on YouTube.
“The crazy thing about it is, every year it tends to increase in popularity,” Carey told Billboard in November 2017. “I’m very thankful that people seem to still have an attachment to it. It makes me feel good when people tell me that it’s part of their lives.”
To celebrate the 30-year anniversary of her album Merry Christmas, Carey announced in October that she will be rereleasing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on both vinyl and cassette formats with new cover art.
“While it is definitely not time to listen to Christmas music yet !! I wanted to share a glimpse of #MerryChristmas30 🎄with you!” Carey wrote via Instagram alongside several of the new images in which she is seen wearing a figure-hugging “sexy Santa” outfit as well as a long, fluffy white gown, slashed to the thigh and trimmed with feathers. “An homage to the original album cover, here is the cover art for two of the four new ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ physical singles…available for pre-order now! 🎁💝.”
Mariah Carey. James Devaney/WireImage
Although the song has become one of the most popular hits of all time, there has still been some controversy surrounding the track.
Last year, Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) filed a complaint in a Los Angeles federal court claiming that Carey’s track infringed on the copyright of a 1989 song of the same name. Vance alleged that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” shares the same title, lyrics and composition as his track, which was released by his country pop group Vince Vance & the Valiants.
“The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, [but] in 1988, it was, in context, distinctive,” the claim read, according to paperwork obtained by Us Weekly. “Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50 percent clone of Vance’s original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
In August, Carey’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that any similarities between the two songs are coincidental.
