Christmas hit songs: How much money can you make from a Yuletide tune?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single that becomes a big Christmas hit, will render unto its maker a good fortune.

That truth was the basis of Nick Hornby’s novel About A Boy, and its 2002 film adaptation, where Hugh Grant’s character Will Freeman lives a life of comfort and idleness bankrolled by never-ending royalties from a Christmas hit his father wrote in the 1950s.

A Christmas hit, the kind that swirls around our consciousness every December (please stop), can set you up for life; it is, Noddy Holder says, “like winning the lottery every December 25th for the rest of your life”. Holder, Slade’s lead singer, and its oft-forgotten bassist Jim Lea, wrote Merry Christmas Everybody (Lea penned the chorus), a Christmas Number One in both 1973 and 1989.

The British Performing Right Society (PRS) has described it as the most-heard song in the world, and it has been estimated to earn nearly €1.17 million (£1 million) a year in royalties. That must be true, because a Channel 5 programme in 2016 (Eamonn & Ruth: A Million Pound Christmas), said it was. According to Channel 5, Mariah Carey’s 1994 All I Want For Christmas earns over €469,000 (£400,000) (its popularity is undoubtedly boosted in 2003 by its use in Love, Actually), and Wham’s Last Christmas (famously beaten to the top spot in 1984 by the Band Aid’s Do They Know it’s Christmas?)rakes in €352,510 (£300,000).

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The 2016 rundown also includes Fairytale of New York by Pogues and Kirsty MacColl which earns over €469,000 (£400,000), Wonderful Christmas time by Paul McCartney €305,582 (£260,000), Stay Another Day by East 17 €117,531 (£100,000), 2000 Miles by The Pretenders €119,882 (£102,000), Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard €117,531 (£100,000).

For those who are quids in from years of the bells jingling with the sound of repeat business, the often enormous repeating income is divvied up between label or producer, songwriter and performer (sometimes the last two are the same).

White Christmas by Irving Berlin, most famously sung by Bing Crosby, was deemed the bestselling single of all time by Guinness Book of World Records

Keith Johnson at Irish Music Rights Organisation explains how, “typically, all contributors to the song, if it’s a major hit, will be getting their share”, though they might not agree on what the appropriate share is.

The royalty split can be “different, because each contract would be different. Some contracts, especially in some of these perennial hit Christmas songs, would be going back decades. Some writers have stronger bargaining power when it comes to the split on royalties on the sale price of a CD or a piece of vinyl. It could be distinctly different if you’re a legacy act or somebody that’s just starting out fresh.”

Income also breaks down differently, depending on where royalties come from. “In some situations the performer will do better than their songwriter, and that could flip in a different income stream, where the writer will get a better deal. There isn’t a set formula.”

It’s a neat trick to manage a few of those simultaneously. Jona Lewie’s Stop The Cavalry (1980), played seasonally because of the heart-tugging “wish I was at home for Christmas”, earns over €141,038 (£120,000) a year, “50 per cent of my real income”, he’s said. “The thing is, I do everything on the track. I write the lyrics and the melody, so that’s all of the publishing. And because I’m a musician I can do all the backing track, so that’s all the recording royalty. I was a one-man show. And if you can get a track associated with Christmas, you get annual regurgitation, and potential for earning every year.”

On the other hand, while Shakin’ Stevens reputedly earns around £10,000 from radio plays of Merry Christmas Everyone (1985), most of the estimated £130,000 annual royalties goes to songwriter Bob Heatlie.

White Christmas by Irving Berlin, most famously sung by Bing Crosby, was deemed the bestselling single of all time by Guinness Book of World Records. It has sold 100 million-plus worldwide, and was reckoned in 2016 to make €385,723 (£328,000) royalties annually.

We just wrote a good song that happens to be at Christmas,' said MacGowan, 'it is a no-nonsense, no-bullshit song about a fighting couple, but it was open-ended'

And the nightmare at Christmas: “If I was to spend time working out what the record company got – and those in that team of people around us – I would lose my mind,” Liz Mitchell, singer with Boney M (Mary’s Boy Child – Oh My Lord from 1978) told the Guardian years later. Apparently each of the four Boneys got “maybe a seventh of one per cent” from sales of 1.2 million-plus.

And then there’s the Pogues’ Fairytale Of New York, brutal and bittersweet, trotted out at this time of year so incongruously and continuously that the heartache and meaning has been almost beaten out of it. Almost. Even singer Shane MacGowan, who cowrote it with Jem Finer, has acknowledged “it’s just musical wallpaper now”, although “I hear it and it doesn’t make me sick. It’s pretty good.”

They wrote it over a couple of years after Elvis Costello challenged MacGowan to write a non-slushy seasonal duet to sing with bassist Caitlin O’Riordan (though it was ultimately recorded in 1987 with the late Kirsty McColl).

“We just wrote a good song that happens to be at Christmas,” MacGowan told Patrick Freyne (when he and Anna Carey were attempting to nail the Christmas hit formula themselves). It is, said MacGowan, “a no-nonsense, no-bullshit song about a fighting couple, but it was open-ended”.

It is also a money-spinner, according to that 2016 analysis, bagging €470,434 (£400,000) in royalties a year. As of September 2017, it had a total of 1.5 million combined sales in the UK alone.

While the big Christmas hits we hear nonstop “generate decent money” online, says Keith Johnson at Imro, “in most cases for a song to be very successful currently, and generate long-term income, it has to be picking up radio play and TV performances in addition to streaming. You might in the first year sell a lot of physical CDs or vinyl, but if it’s a hit song and gets perennial coverage across radio or TV, that’s where you see the long tail income stream coming through.”

Mind you, he points out, the market evolves, and some big hits on platforms such as Tik Tok may not ever be on radio, but could generate royalty income in future for the creators.

But for example “a song like George Michael’s Last Christmas, it’s generating a lot of its income from radio plays. Fairytale of New York will be similar. It would still get decent streaming numbers, but you only have to turn on the radio and it’s probably played every hour somewhere at this time of year. You walk into any shop or a restaurant, it’s on in the background, and that’s generating much income as well. Or other people performing the song live in concert. When we go back to concerts.”

So which are the top earners among those songs which drive us demented with their ubiquity, and yet which we find ourselves humming along to, as they trigger some seasonal hormone in our brains?

Aside from those 2016 estimates, website Celebrity Net Worth in December 2020 listed what it deemed the most profitable Christmas songs, both in yearly royalties and cumulatively. They were as follows:

Top earning Christmas songs (yearly royalties)
1 Slade: Merry Christmas Everybody (1973): €745,000
2 The Pogues: Fairytale of New York (1987): €560,000
3 Mariah Carey: All I Want for Christmas Is You (1994): €530,000
4 Wham!: Last Christmas (1984): €445,000 
5 Band Aid: Do They Know It's Christmas (1984): €115,000

Top earning Christmas songs of all time
1 Irving Berlin: White Christmas (1940). Estimated earnings: €57 million
2 Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff: All I Want For Christmas Is You (1994). Estimated earnings: €53 million
3 Haven Gillespie and Fred J Coots: Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1934). Estimated earnings: €44 million
4 Mel Torme: The Christmas Song (which we think of as Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) (1944). Estimated earnings: €40 million
5 Paul McCartney: Wonderful Christmastime (1979). Estimated earnings: €35 million