Holiday Music Dominating Music Streams

It wasn’t so long ago that a blockbuster fourth-quarter album by a music superstar could rescue a record company from financial ruin, or at least a slow sales year. Think of Jay-Z’s “Kingdom Come,” which sold 680,000 copies during Black Friday week in 2006 and showed up beneath plenty of Christmas trees that year.

But in today’s world of Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, music fans are paying less attention to those kinds of late-in-the-year releases. They’re too busy streaming Christmas music, reports The NYTimes.

“For the first time, this year, we are actually dissuading our labels from releasing albums in the December time period,” said Vinnie Freda, the Warner Music Group’s chief data officer. “It’s like the world stopped between Dec. 7 and Dec. 28. It’s like people stopped listening to music.”

These are boom times for holiday music, with overall streams increasing to nearly 2.4 billion in the fourth quarter last year from almost 1.3 billion in the same period in 2015, according to Nielsen Music. But with the exception of a few traditional pop-star releases, including Taylor Swift and Sam Smith this year and Adele in 2015, shopping-season superstar albums have become noticeably more absent.

Many in the record business are encouraging the biggest stars to put out albums in other months like January, after people receive iTunes gift cards and streaming subscriptions for Christmas presents, and September, when students get ready to go back to school.

Earlier this year, after the pop star Sia informed her manager, Jonathan Daniel, that she liked Christmas music, he encouraged her to write two holiday originals. She responded with a full album. The result, “Everyday Is Christmas,” has 10 songs that have streamed a combined 55 million times on Spotify, generating revenue of nearly $385,000 via that service alone, according to estimates based on data from the Recording Industry Association of America. It has also sold 16,000 physical CDs and 17,000 digital versions.

So December is now primarily for holiday music. Streaming has increased the popularity of chestnuts like the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas,” as well as newer stars like Michael Bublé and Pentatonix.