MARIAH CAREY's "ALL I WANT I FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU" was released 25 years, three presidencies, the lifespan of HARRY STYLES and basically the entire careers of JAY-Z and NAS ago. If "All I Want..." were an artist, it would be eligible for the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME. If it were a person, it could run for Congress. The one thing it shouldn't be able to do under normal pop music circumstances is hit #1 on the BILLBOARD HOT 100 for the first time this week. But these aren't normal times, and this miraculously conceived pop gem is no ordinary holiday song. (It was conceived and produced, for whatever it's worth, by Carey and WALTER AFANASIEFF, though the actual nature of the collaboration has long been in dispute and the two haven't spoken in more than 20 years; the gloriously joyful lead vocal, obviously, is all her.) There are a lot of reasons why no Christmas song has topped the Hot 100 in 60 years, some of them having to do with Billboard chart rules, which among other things made them ineligible for several years. There are a lot of other reasons why it's possible, given a perfect storm of circumstances, for it to happen now, even with a 25-year-old song. But as the NEW YORK TIMES' JOE COSCARELLI makes clear in this well reported account of how it happened, it took a very long and relentless marketing campaign by SONY MUSIC (starting 25 years ago when Sony's COLUMBIA RECORDS convinced Carey to make a Christmas album against her own instincts), and years of incredibly hard work by Carey. Like so many great things, it took a little bit of magic and a hell of a lot of sweat. And that unforgettable vocal performance. And the existence of streaming music. And the joy of the season... According to a 2017 story in the ECONOMIST that's been widely cited by other sites in the past couple years, "All I Want for Christmas for You" had earned an astonishing $60 million in royalties up to that point, or more than $2 million a year—for a single song with an annual lifespan of about six weeks. The figure, unfortunately, was both unsourced and unexplored, so it's impossible to know if it's right. But even if it was off by 100 percent and the song had only earned $30 million up to that point—wow. I should have listened to my dad all those years when he begged me to write Christmas songs. (The Economist also shared the perhaps not surprising news that Christmas songs get more play in regions with the coldest weather and the least amount of daylight. Alaska loves you, Mariah)... But the real money is in touring, right? U2 grossed just over $1 billion (yes, that's a B) from 255 shows in 141 cities over the past 10 years, making it the decade's highest grossing touring artist, according to POLLSTAR. Coming up behind were the ROLLING STONES, ED SHEERAN and TAYLOR SWIFT, whose grosses were all in the $900 million range. And you're not imagining the steady rise of ticket prices. The average seat for the decade's top 100 tours cost 36.7 percent more than it did in the previous decade, $96.17 vs. $70.33, and the average gross per show nearly doubled. PINK was the highest grossing artist in the year from November 2018 to November 2019, grossing $215.2 million from 68 shows worldwide... And where does money *not* come from? A) trees. B) streaming royalties if your job title is songwriter. "It’s something I deal with every day," songwriter manager JAIME ZELUCK HINDLIN tells MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE. "My writer wrote on this, it’s only going to probably get a couple of million streams, how are they going to make money?" Only.A.Couple.Million.Streams. Hindlin thinks songwriters should get a share of a song's master rights: "It’s not standard and I think it should be"... RIP POPA WU.