Taylor Swift’s Rivals This Holiday: Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole<br />It’s like people stopped listening to music.”<br />These are boom times for holiday music, with overall streams increasing to nearly 2.4 billion in the fourth<br />quarter last year from almost 1.3 billion in the same period in 2015, according to Nielsen Music.<br />Alex Luke, global head of programming and content strategy for Amazon Music, which is emphasizing holiday content such as Smokey<br />Robinson’s new “Christmas Everyday,” said fans were simply consuming more of both holiday and pop music this time of year<br />Streaming has increased the popularity of chestnuts like the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas”<br />and Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas,” as well as newer stars like Michael Bublé and Pentatonix.<br />Spotify has 16 in-house holiday playlists, like “Christmas Pop”<br />and “Blue Christmas,” totaling nearly four million followers; SiriusXM has added eight holiday-music channels, including one devoted entirely to Hanukkah music.<br />“It feels like streaming is the way people are going to listen to Christmas music in the future,” Mr. Daniel said.<br />“For the first time, this year, we are actually dissuading our labels from releasing albums in<br />the December time period,” said Vinnie Freda, the Warner Music Group’s chief data officer.
