In this world, so much is uncertain. One thing that we can count on this December is the stratospheric launch of streams for the Mariah Carey smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” For the fourth year running, the track is set to be the most-streamed song in a single day.
In 2017, the song eclipsed 8 million daily streams from around the globe. 2018 saw nearly 11 million in a day and 2019 eclipsed 12 million. This year the track seems to be well on pace to break all single-day records again. If history is a good guide, I think that we can expect to see streams exceed 14, maybe 15 million streams this year.
Holiday Surge
As established in an earlier post, Spotify daily charts have seen consistent growth over time. This means that we would expect to see more streams each year. However, in the same post, we also established that streaming totals took a sharp dip early in the pandemic.
Whatever slump streaming saw in the early pandemic, streaming totals of top songs appears to have recovered to about the same levels as last year. This is demonstrated in the figure below, total daily streams on the global chart has inched back towards the 250 million mark seen last year. What is notable is that each year there is a sharp uptick in streaming around the end of the year holidays, peaking on Christmas Eve the last four years. So far, 2020 seems to have seen a larger-than-normal holiday streaming surge. This December 11th was the 4th-highest streaming total day in history, trailing only Christmas Eve of 2018 and 2019 and Christmas Day of 2019. It’s a good indicator that Christmas Eve 2020 will be the highest yet, perhaps surpassing 500 million streams for the top 200 songs globally.
Spotify’s Highest Daily Streams
The below chart shows the top 10 most-streamed songs in a single day. You can see that each year “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” see a huge spike every holiday season. I think it is pretty telling that two of the top ten most streamed daily songs are Christmas-themed, at least one day a year much of the world is on the same page.
It is also interesting to see the life-cycle of a hit. Some, like Bad Bunny’s recent banger “DÁKITI” or Ed Sheeran’s “I Don’t Care” topped out in streaming popularity on their first day. Others were popular early, but took some time to really hit their peak. One final interesting point is “SAD!” by XXXTENTACION. The song reached its highest streaming total on June 19, 2018 – he was killed the day before. To fully quote Drake’s selective quoting of Jimmy Smith, “Only real music’s gonna last. All that other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow.” Mariah and Wham! appear to be real music.
