“Ariana’s fans are aging with her,” Pettyjohn said. “It becomes a classic to them.”
Grande’s song gets a small boost on TikTok, where it has been used in 371,000 videos — peanuts compared to Carey’s smash, which has been used on TikTok 12 million times and racked up more than 1.2 billion streams on Spotify alone.
The enduring popularity of Carey’s song is one of the great phenomena of the contemporary music business. In 2019, after a yearslong push by Carey and her label that involved a children’s book, a new music video and numerous live Christmas shows, “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, 25 years after its initial release. (It topped that chart again in 2020 and 2021, and has a good shot of doing so again this year.)
But Carey’s dominance in another arena became the subject of a legal fight this year, after she attempted to trademark the term “Queen of Christmas,” not only for music but also for fragrances, clothing, dog collars, hot chocolate and dozens of other products.
Her only challenger was Elizabeth Chan, who a decade ago gave up a marketing job at Condé Nast to devote herself to writing holiday music, and who has called herself — and titled one of her albums — the Queen of Christmas.
In a recent interview at her small home office in Lower Manhattan, which she keeps decorated for Christmas year-round, Chan said the trademark was a threat to her livelihood. While strictly D.I.Y., Chan has built a full-time business making holiday music, releasing 12 albums to date, including her latest, “12 Months of Christmas.” She would no longer be able to use the term “Queen of Christmas” if Carey’s application was approved.
The costs of litigating a trademark can be huge, but Chan’s attorney, Louis W. Tompros, said his firm, WilmerHale, took the case pro bono because they viewed Carey’s application as an example of “classic trademark bullying.” Carey never responded to Chan’s opposition, and on Nov. 15, the Trademark Office’s trial and appeal board issued a judgment by default, denying Carey the trademark. Chan, and anyone else, is free to call themselves Queen of Christmas.
