Santa, Please Bring Back the Hits for Christmas

Twenty years ago, broadcasters decided that AC listeners loved Christmas music so much that they would be OK with not hearing any current music for 4-6 weeks. That decision has clearly proven itself out. But we’ve just come off three weeks of Hot 100 domination by 60-year-old songs, looking at a New Music Friday pipeline that will finally become truly active again on Jan. 12.

The upshot is that AC’s decision ended up reducing new music for listeners in most other formats as well. Part of what made holiday music special to me growing up was that it was still something different that happened for only a few weeks at a time. I have a lot of great memories involving music at Christmas, and they only occasionally involve Christmas music.

In December 1973, we went on a New York-to-Florida road trip that helped shape my interest in radio and hit music for life. I loved how the hits changed as I got further south, and knowing about those songs six weeks before they became hits in the Northeast. Some of the major hits of that moment still play on radio today, especially “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “The Joker.” Christmas music was there, of course, but the only one I remember was discovering a several-year-old song that I didn’t like, “Ding-A-Ling the Christmas Bell” by Lynn Anderson.

I drove from New York to the Berkshires on Christmas 1984. Holiday music was more prominent then because both “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “Last Christmas” were new, two rare instances of new Christmas songs that were competitive as current hits. But it was also the second Christmas of the ’80s CHR boom and there was plenty of new excitement—“Like a Virgin,” Bryan Adams’s breakthrough, “I Feel For You,” and Wham’s two other hits. 

I moved back east at Christmas 1987, at what felt like a bummer moment for Top 40 radio. I do remember that trip for holiday music, in part because the first A Very Special Christmas had just been released, meaning that suddenly the holiday offerings from contemporary bands were more likely to be remakes than new songs. That’s why I love how the songs that I remember Christmas 1988 in Orlando by are “My Prerogative,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Straight Up.”

My holiday 1997 music memory is the WHTZ (Z100) New York Jingle Ball, so it’s less based in December’s hits as much as all the hits that that drove CHR’s comeback that year. I do, however, remember Aerosmith’s “Pink,” the current single whose promotion motivated them to share the stage with the Backstreet Boys, Hanson, and Chumbawamba. (They were, of course, pretty amazing as the veteran act on stage.)

The holiday break of 1963 was the incubation period for Beatlemania. Slate’s Chris Molanphy suggests a similar spending-the-gift-money effect on behalf of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991. For years, the importance of the fourth quarter meant that you could count on a steady flow of superstar singles starting around the week before Labor Day. If new artist singles popped off anywhere around the world in late fall, you could generally count on them getting a big push in the first week of January.

Most of my December music memories predate the all-Christmas music format at AC radio, and all of them are before holiday music became a juggernaut. So looking at the charts, in America and the UK during the holidays, has been particularly dismaying. On Billboard’s Hot 100 between Christmas and New Year’s Day, 16 of the top 20 were holiday songs; only four recent titles were competitive with “Jingle Bells” by Frank Sinatra and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Dean Martin.

In the UK, it’s even more pronounced. Music Week’s airplay chart is all-format, meaning that it’s been dominated by holiday releases in December ever since AC powerhouse Magic finally went all-holiday music five years ago. Seventeen of the top 20 songs were Christmas music, although there’s at least one 2023 release (Sam Ryder’s “You’re Christmas to Me”) in there. The top non-holiday song is Dua Lipa’s “Houdini.”

For the artists who weren’t afraid of releasing product late in fourth quarter, there was a payoff. Tate McRae went from looking for a solid second hit to having two hits in play at once when “Exes” joined “Greedy,” with some stations playing “Run for the Hills” as well. Jack Harlow’s “Lovin’ on Me,” a rapid No. 1, quickly rebounded after the holiday. But those are the exceptions.

If any 65-year-old record is going to be No. 1, I’m happy it was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” I’m also glad to see “Last Christmas” in the UK’s Holiday No. 1 slot, nearly 40 years after being held out by Band-Aid. I’m happy that the combination of AC Christmas airplay and the support of iHeart CHR stations has brought Cher back even briefly to Top 40 after 58 years without a reissue.

Because I can piece together the radio dial I want to hear, I did manage to have some new music memories for the holidays. Some were the hits as heard on the recently profiled KMVQ (99.7 Now) San Francisco. Many are from my current favorite international CHR, Prague’s Europa 2, where I listened for 45 minutes between the holidays and heard one new-to-me song after another. But it’s still dismaying to know that only four songs are better for today’s audience than “Jingle Bells.”

The effective shutdown of new music at holiday time is a culmination of almost every dismaying trend of recent years: a music industry that doesn’t want to break songs at radio, and broadcasters for whom that’s seemingly just fine; an AC format with a far bigger reach than the Top 40 stations that are suffering record low ratings. During the year, that’s an issue, too. AC’s reliance on CHR recurrents has a lot to do with how those songs clog the charts, making it harder in turn for CHR to produce new hits.

CHR’s struggles also feed into the stagnation of the all-Christmas format. When a format doesn’t produce new stars, it doesn’t create the sort of artists who have the ability to put a new holiday song on the agenda like Mariah Carey in 1994 or Ariana Grande in 2014. At least the Cher and Jimmy Fallon/Meghan Trainor singles had some footprint at both CHR and all-holiday formats this year. Perhaps that will translate into those songs being part of the canon in future years.

At the very least, having new pop music shut down for six weeks (or longer) means having a tenth-fewer hits available to formats that can’t afford not to have hits. It also leaves CHR and Hot AC stations even less able to compete during the holidays, as the numbers show. If you’re still relying primarily on “Calm Down” and “Cruel Summer,” the station playing the 60-year-old “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” is actually the one with a song that is fresher to listeners, or at least generating more passion.

Having new music at holiday time again means undoing almost every dismaying trend of recent years, but particularly reactivating the music pipeline between labels and broadcasters. I’m not sure if other people see a problem with having current music go on hiatus, but it’s hard to defend the current lack of music overall. It would be in our industries’ interest to fix that now, rather than waiting a year.