I was never a huge George Michael fan, but I always had a great deal of respect for his talent and have enjoyed some of his songs. That said, I think we can agree that Last Christmas was a decidedly minor entry into the artist’s catalog, which wasn’t an issue until the Christmas muzak algorithm decided to play it very fifteen minutes.

From Wikipedia:

In December 2023, "Last Christmas" became Christmas number one. It also became the third-best selling UK single, with 5.34 million sales, including streams. As of December 2023, "Last Christmas" had sold over 1.93 million physical copies and downloads, making it the eighth-bestselling single ever in the UK. It was certified six-times platinum in December 2023. In 2024, it became the first song to be Christmas number one for two consecutive years. That year, PRS for Music estimated that "Last Christmas" generates £300,000 of royalties per year.

(Trivia buffs might remember that the perpetual royalties from a Christmas hit were a key plot point in both the book and the movie About a Boy.)

The definitive post on the persistence of Christmas songs that should have long since worn out their welcome wasn’t a post at all; it was this cartoon from XKCD.

While Randall’s point is valid, it does leave out a couple of arguably more important factors.

For decades, you could see popular media trying to appeal to some idealized viewer born circa 1952 because, like the man said about the banks, that was where the money was. The market was huge and everybody wanted a piece. Studios, record companies and publishers pumped out tons upon tons of content while going back to the previous decade to find more material to fill the pipeline (particularly for television). It helped that the forties was golden age for Christmas standards, written largely by Jewish songwriters like Irving Berlin.

By the end of the mid-sixties, media companies had an enormous catalog of Christmas songs, some of them very good, with a huge amount of name recognition, which led to the second factor: content accumulates, and between the craving for familiarity around the holidays and the eleven month breaks, the shelf life of of this genre was very long indeed.

We certainly can’t blame boomer nostalgia for Last Christmas, but given that the age of that song today matches the age of Frosty and Holly Jolly in 2000, we can possibly blame old people in general.