Mariah Carey‘s “All I Want for Christmas (Make My Wish Come True Edition)” music video is the latest subject of Vevo’s Footnotes series, just in time for the holiday season.

In messages printed next to shots from the 2019 visual for the Footnotes episode, posted Friday (Dec. 6), the superstar sheds light on its creative direction and memories from the shoot. “We wanted to create a video that is different from the original one, but still very fun,” Carey writes. “The concept was to be very glamorous and in the style of a Busby Berkeley film.”

The Songbird Supreme added that “working with the female dancers and figuring out how to blend with them” was the most “challenging” part of the shoot. “I think it worked out well although dancing is not my forte.”

Directed by Joseph Kahn, the “All I Want for Christmas Is You (Make My Wish Come True Edition)” video dropped in 2019 in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the song. It finds Carey standing as part of a department-store window display, dressed in her signature holiday jumpsuit, before cutting to a white winter wonderland, where the vocalist is joined by dancers dressed in peppermint outfits and nutcracker costumes.

The anniversary edition was pointedly more glamorous and showy than the original “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” filmed in the style of cozy home videos. Of the decision to go the opposite direction for the “Make My Wish Come True” version, Kahn explained in Footnotes, “The goal was to make the definitive Christmas music video that should have been made but never was until now.”

The superstar’s Footnotes episode comes as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” returns to the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated Dec. 7, where it sits at No. 10. In total, the smash has spent 14 collective weeks at No. 1 since it was originally released in 1994.

Carey is currently finishing out her 2024 holiday tour, which kicked off early November. Her next show is slated for Saturday (Dec. 7) in Baltimore, and the limited trek will end Dec. 17 with a performance in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Watch Carey’s episode of Footnotes below.

If it seems like everybody is talking about Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s data-driven annual recap of listening habits, it’s because everybody is talking about Spotify Wrapped. That says a lot about its effectiveness and its value to the company.  

The streaming platform’s personalized year-end recap is unmissable this time of year. Mashable began prepping its readers back on Nov. 19. A week later, Spotify heightened expectations by advising users to update the Spotify app to the latest, Wrapped-ready version. When Wrapped finally appeared on Wednesday (Dec. 4), there was an onslaught of media coverage. Billboard even got into the Wrapped coverage, revealing Chappell Roan’s top artists and songs on Spotify in 2024 (Ariana Grande and Heart’s “Barracuda,” respectively).   

With so much media coverage, some of it is bound to carry a grousing, annoyed tone. “Hate your Spotify Wrapped?” Rolling Stone asked, “You’re not alone.” “Sorry, parents,” The Washington Post lamented, “it’s actually your kids’ Spotify Wrapped.” Vogue turned Wrapped into a frank self-examination in an article titled “I love Spotify Wrapped so much I hate it.” For people whose Spotify Wrapped “suck[ed],” Pocket-lint suggests ways to “fix it” in 2025. The Huffington Post’s compilation of the “funniest” tweets about Wrapped was filled with only mildly humorous complaints.  

In contrast, articles about Wrapped’s peers came and went without anything close to the same level of media hullabaloo. The annual recaps of Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music received basic coverage at mostly tech-oriented publications but didn’t elicit the kind of longwinded pop culture essays that Wrapped conjures up every year. Apple Music Replay received run-of-the-mill articles such as “Apple Music’s yearly recap is finally available in the app” at tech news site The Verge. When TechCrunch covered the launch of Amazon Music’s 2024 Delivered, the headline referred to it as Amazon’s “take on Spotify Wrapped” lest nobody know what they were talking about. YouTube Music Recap launched on Nov. 25 to little media coverage.  

For its part, Spotify contributed to the media overload by building a 2024 Wrapped microsite and posting 10 Wrapped-related press releases on launch day. Wrapped itself introduced new innovations in 2024, including a personalized Wrapped podcast featuring two AI hosts and the Your Music Evolution Playlist, a personalized playlist that tracks a user’s different musical interests and phases throughout the year. Wrapped has become such an important event that Spotify hosted a pre-release press briefing that featured talks by executives across the company. As Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify software engineer and author of the book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changed Music, told Billboard via email, “nothing else they do gets as much marketing/branding energy put into it.”  

Wrapped especially shines in the awareness it attracts on social media. At the end of every Wrapped recap, Spotify offers personalized badges that flood X, Instagram and TikTok — the latter two benefitting from integrations announced in November that make it easier to share content. In this way, Wrapped turns its users into “active brand advocates on social media,” as one academic study put it. Or, as another paper phrased it, Spotify turns its users into “free labour” to help market its product. “For Spotify, it is 100% a brand-visibility moment,” says McDonald. “Social virality is the only metric the company cares about. The viral attention does help with user retention and reactivation, but the virality itself is the thing they’re measuring.”  

More than an effective marketing ploy, Wrapped has turned into a competitive advantage in a business where standalone music streaming services desperately need one. A company has a competitive advantage when it creates more economic value than its competitors. Economic value is the difference between the perceived value of the product and the costs required to produce the product. Some brands are able to charge a premium because they have succeeded, through the quality of the product and the effectiveness of marketing, in convincing consumers their product is worth more. Food made with better ingredients commands a price premium, for example. Sometimes differences in perception of value come down to marketing. The difference between luxury clothing brands’ prices can be explained by amounts spent on splashy advertisements and celebrity endorsements, not just the cost of materials and labor.   

Unlike streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services, which attract viewers mainly through exclusive programming, music streaming platforms have — for the most part — the same content and must find other avenues to attract and retain customers. Amazon Music Unlimited, for example, is cheaper for members of Amazon Prime. Apple Music benefits from being part of the Apple entertainment ecosystem and Apple’s ownership of music identification app Shazam. YouTube Music gets its subscribers through YouTube, the most popular streaming app in the world. Spotify, a standalone company, can’t match Amazon’s low price, Apple’s omnipresence or YouTube’s ubiquity.  

Instead, Spotify competes on product features it develops in-house. Launched in 2015, Discover Weekly, a personalized playlist filled with recently released tracks, was so popular that people who streamed their Discover Weekly playlists streamed twice as much as people who didn’t. A product that popular helps give Spotify an advantage over its larger competitors. Discover Weekly was launched the same year Apple launched Apple Music. Although many onlookers expected Apple would crush Spotify, Spotify has consistently maintained a sizable lead in market share, and innovation played an important role in holding off behemoths like Apple and Amazon. As Will Page, former Spotify chief economist, put it in his 2021 book Pivot, Discover Weekly “create[d] a moat to protect Spotify’s castle.”

Wrapped follows in Discover Weekly’s footsteps as a moat-building product innovation. The key is Spotify’s ability to get its listeners to talk about Wrapped. One study found that Spotify Wrapped was more effective than Apple Music Replay in users’ willingness to create user-generated content (i.e. share Wrapped on social media). That’s gold in a business where consumers can choose between a number of fairly identical substitutes with similar features. Anything that increases engagement and prevents users from leaving for Apple, Amazon or YouTube is valuable. In that sense, developing a product that becomes a part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Wrapped, is perhaps the biggest competitive advantage a streaming service can have.

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

Whether you’re looking for a great holiday gift for someone special in your life, or yourself, we found a deep discount to make shopping a joy — especially for music lovers.

On sale for $89 (reg. $159) at Walmart, the Beats Studio3 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones are a premium pair that delivers clear and rich audio with deep and booming bass to listen to music and podcasts on-the-go (when paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth). They’re also sleek and stylish, as a bold fashion and audio statement.

And since the Beats Studio3 Headphones are from Walmart, you’ll get them shipped to you for free if you’re a Walmart+ member. Otherwise, your cart has to be more than $35 to get free shipping.

If you’re not a member, then you’re in luck. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial to take advantage of everything the retailer’s rewards program has to offer with perks such as free, fast delivery; fuel discounts’ streaming access to Paramount+ to watch hit originals; additional savings with early access deals and much more.

Meanwhile, Walmart+ also comes with access to SiriusXM for all sorts of talk radio and music — including popular channels, like “SiriusXM Hits 1” for pop hits from Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, SZA, Dua Lipa, Post Malone, Olivia Rodrigo and more.

LOWEST PRICE EVER

Beats Studio3 Wireless Over-Ear Noise-Cancelling Headphones

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Aside from high-quality audio, the Beats Studio3 Headphones sync to Apple iPhone and Android smartphones alike. The wireless headphones also feature seamless and automatic connection with all sorts of Apple products — thanks to their built-in Apple W1 chip, which is the very same chip in Apple AirPods.

In addition, these headphones offer up to 12 hours of battery life on a single charge. In fact, if you’re on a time crunch, the headphones have ‘Fast Fuel’ features, which gives you three hours of playback time with just a 10-minute quick charge.

The Beats Studio3 Wireless Over-Ear Noise-Cancelling Headphones are on sale for $89 (reg. $159) at Walmart and come in three colors — Black, shadow gray and white — all for the same price.

For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Xbox deals, studio headphones and Nintendo Switch accessories.