13 December 2023 , 16:04
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As soon as your hear the sultry tone of Mariah Carey singing All I Want For Christmas Is You, you know the festive season has finally kicked off.
And it since its release 29 years ago in 1994, the song, which was written within an astonishing 15 minutes, has become an iconic tune the world over. So it's perhaps little wonder that the song alone, despite her many other chart-topping hits, will earn her a staggering £80million. In 2019, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, 25 years after its original release, making it a record breaker.
Mariah Carey's Christmas song is one of the best selling of all time for 29 years (Getty Images)
Mariah Carey performs on stage during Global Citizen Festival last year (Getty Images for Global Citizen)The following year, it then topped the charts in the United Kingdom for the first time, spending 69 weeks in the top 40 before hitting the number one spot. With an estimated sales of more than 16 million copies, it has become the best-selling Christmas single by a female artist
According to the Official Charts Company data, the song's total UK chart units reached 4.6 million, including 327,000 physical sales and 939,000 downloads. And it's also one of the most streamed songs of all time with a combined total of 737 million audio and video streams.
Speaking about when she penned the hit song, she revealed on Good Morning America: "I was working on it by myself so I was writing on this little Casio keyboard, writing down words and thinking about, 'What do I think about Christmas? What do I love? What do I want? What do I dream of?'and that’s what started it."
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Mariah Carey starring in video for Christmas hit All I Want for Christmas is YouBut there is actually quite a sad back story to the Christmas single as the festive period was not always a happy time for the star. She has previously said on Australian chat show The Project: "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 added: "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. 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."
She continued: "I have to be thankful for it. It comes from a real place, a place of longing and it's pretty celebratory." 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.