As everyone knows well, Santa Claus lives in Lapland, Finland. And when Christmas arrives again, Santa Claus begins his journey from Lapland all around the world to the kind children, just as Bruce Springsteen sings “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” (© Coots and Gillespie – USSMU17500462 – Single Version).
But in good time before Santa Claus starts his journey, Christmas carols start playing on the radio, television, in shops and why not also in bars and pubs all around the world. And of course, Christmas carols are available to everyone all year round through music streaming services. However, based on the listings of streaming services, an analysis has been made that internationally, after Halloween, i.e. in the first week of November, Christmas carols begin to play abundantly on various streaming services. In other words, Christmas carols are still seasonal music, even in the streaming era.
In the official genre classifications of the music industry, a Christmas carol can belong to any genre of music like Pop, Rock, Heavy Metal or Jazz etc. but the theme of Christmas is the decisive factor.
While this is happening, considerable sums of money revolve around Christmas carols and their recordings, and many circles of friends and bar groups are having their own discussions about what might be the most playing and perhaps the most “earning” Christmas song in the world. Nowadays there is a reasonably “universal” view of top songs such as Mariah Carey: “All I want for Christmas is you” – Wham: “Last Christmas” – Brenda Lee: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas tree” – Pogues: “Fairytale of New York“. And of course, there are other songs as well.
For decades, Gramex Finland has also published a list of the most played Christmas songs and recordings from the previous Christmas on Finnish commercial radios. Based on the lists compiled by my Gramex colleague Mr. Kari Niemelä, you can take a closer look at the situation in Finland. In Finland, Wham’s “Last Christmas” has been the undisputed number-one song on the charts for many decades, which was not even originally made into a Christmas carol! Sometimes the number one has also been someone else, like John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is over)”. By the way, a new list will be published very soon.
At some point, many artists or bands also released their own Christmas album in Finland, such as Juice Leskinen Slam’s legendary “Kuusessa ollaan” (Poko Records 1980 – PÄLP 18).
It should be clear to everyone that Christmas carols involve a great deal of financial interest. For example, Slade‘s frontman Noddy Holder has said that a good Christmas song is tantamount to a creator and performer winning the lottery every Christmas for the rest of your life. For example, Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everyone” is estimated to generate around one million pounds a year in copyright revenue for the song’s composers alone (Noddy Holder and Jim Lea). Similarly, Mariah Carey is estimated to receive only artist royalties for “All I Want For Christmas” in a year many times greater than the creators of Slade’s Christmas hit.
By the way, did you know that Brenda Lee’s “Rockin Around The Christmas Tree” was released just this fall by Universal Music Group and Music Tech company SoundLabs in Spanish as a legal “artificial intelligence” version under the name “Noche Buena y Navidad“. The song is performed with the voice of 13-year-old Brenda Lee, created with the help of artificial intelligence. They were assisted by Leyla Hoyle, a female singer of Chilean origin who sang in Spanish.
Brenda Lee was 13 years old at the time of the original recording, and Brenda Lee, now 79, gave her consent to this so-called voice replication. By the way, the ISRC code of this recording is USUV72404286 or, if we are to be exact, a total of four new recording releases from 2024 have been registered, each with its own and a different ISRC. So this isn’t easy in the metadata world either?
In practice, many popular Christmas carols are also in the so-called Public Domain in terms of actual copyright, i.e. the term of copyright protection has already expired. In Finland and Europe, the period is 70 years from the year of the author’s death. However, the neighboring rights’ protection period for most of the most popular Christmas carol recordings of the last decade are still in force. In Finland, recordings released before 1963 are exempt from the term of protection.
As I have stated in my previous articles, one significant identifier and metadata issue in the music industry is the ISRC code of the recording.
Many popular Christmas carol recordings were originally released at a time when ISRC was not in use and something like ISRC hadn’t even been invented. Among other things, Wham’s “Last Christmas“, which was released in 1984. Incidentally, ISRC was first introduced in 1989 for music videos, and at the end of 1989 also for audio CD releases in Japan.
ISRC saw increased usage in recording with the CD format in 1992, and this was also the case in Finland. In practice, however, every old Christmas song originally released in vinyl format, for example, has since received an ISRC code when the song has been released either in CD format or in some file format. Often being a remastered version of an old recording.
In addition to individual identifiers such as ISRC or exact genre information in metadata in particular means a lot when talking about “seasonal music” such as Christmas carols. This is particularly true for various DSP services. For example, there are also special guides for publishing Christmas and other seasonal music in DSP services, which provide instructions on how to make metadata correct in these situations. In practice, etc. genre metadata is very closely linked to recommendation metadata, which plays a own significant role in DSP services. This metadata category plays an important role, because algorithms linked to song recommendations can be used to guide the selection of Christmas songs that are very precisely suitable for target groups with a certain listener profile.
Contrary to what is usually thought, this recommendation metadata and its behavior are often not based solely on “pure” music content, but another very significant thing is the factors expressing the listener’s different behavior and the metadata data associated with them. In practice, we can talk about Content-Based methods, Collaborative Filtering methods and, as a combination of these, the Hybrid Recommendation system.
One reasonably simple but significant detail and functionality is the BPM (“Beats Per Minute”), which means that in practice, just by analyzing the tempo of the songs listened to by an individual listener, a considerable number of song recommendations are created. For this reason, BPM is important factor so as Danceability and Loudness. Algorithms in services combine all of these. In other words, some song recommendations are based purely on the so-called general profile and behavior of the music service user.
In addition, the so-called recommendation engines in the services and the related algorithms combine in more detail the music content: genres, BPMs, mood, performance languages, release dates and all other details of different songs of an individual listener. Through all these details above, various recommendations for individual listeners are created. And through these recommendations, it is correspondingly possible that listeners of a particular Christmas song can also participate in targeted “Christmas gift advertising and marketing” in different ways, which can be controlled to a great extent according to the music preferences of individual listeners. However, in this time we will not go into more detail about how advertising and marketing is connected to the listener profile. Maybe more on this later…
Nowadays, therefore, it is not only possible, but very likely, that Santa’s container could find the right Christmas present for you, possibly based on your taste in music and what songs you listen to before Christmas – that is, when in the old days it was said that “Santa Claus comes to the kind children at Christmas”, today it can be said that “Santa Claus comes to the children who listen to music” – in other words – yes, even Santa loves music metadata!
A considerable amount of time has passed since Slade released their hit song “Merry Xmas Everybody” (Polydor) as a vinyl single in 1973, long before the era of modern music metadata. Did you know that the song was recorded at the Record Plant studio in New York City in July 1973 during the hottest days of that summer… and of course, many more Christmas carols will be recorded already in the summer… Otherwise, same studio is also significant in Finnish rock music. The Finnish Hanoi Rocks recorded their most successful album Two Steps From The Move (CBS) there in 1984.
