Taylor Swift’s Rivals This Holiday: Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole
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.
Alex Luke, global head of programming and content strategy for Amazon Music, which is emphasizing holiday content such as Smokey
Robinson’s new “Christmas Everyday,” said fans were simply consuming more of both holiday and pop music this time of year
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.
Spotify has 16 in-house holiday playlists, like “Christmas Pop”
and “Blue Christmas,” totaling nearly four million followers; SiriusXM has added eight holiday-music channels, including one devoted entirely to Hanukkah music.
“It feels like streaming is the way people are going to listen to Christmas music in the future,” Mr. Daniel said.
“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.