Mariah Carey breaks Spotify record for most streamed song in a single day

Mariah Carey has set a Spotify streaming record for the track with the most plays in a single day.

On Saturday 24 December, Carey’s 1994 festive hit, “All I Want for Christmas is You”, was streamed on the service 21.273 million times.

As it stands, that is the most times a song has been streamed on Spotify worldwide in a single 24-hour period.

Up until this recent Christmas Eve, that title was held by Adele’s 2021 comeback track “Easy On Me”, which received 19.747 million streams in a single day.

At the time of writing, Carey’s song remains at the top of the global Spotify charts, followed by SZA’s “Kill Bill”, a new release from her album, SOS.

The current third-most-streamed song of the week is another holiday classic, “Last Christmas” by Wham!.

“All I Want For Christmas is You” was released in 1994 on Carey’s Merry Christmas album. The song has since become a mainstay on many people’s festive playlists.

However, it only reached the number one position in the US charts for the first time in 2020.

The jolly tune repeated that feat in both 2021, and earlier this month when it was announced as the top song on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as the UK Official Chart.

“Such an amazing surprise and an early Christmas gift!!” Carey wrote in a tweet, responding to news that she had topped the charts once again.

The “Always Be My Baby” singer has previously said that she came up with the idea for the song when she was a child, before later fleshing it out as an adult.

The song’s co-writer Walter Afanasieff, however, has claimed that her story about the song’s origins is a “tall tale” .

“To claim that she wrote a very complicated chord-structured song with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was a little girl, it’s kind of a tall tale,” Afanasieff said in a recent podcast. “It’s a difficult song.”