Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Certified 16X Platinum

Mariah Carey has a million reasons to be thankful this holiday season. In fact, the Queen of Christmas has 16 million reasons according to the RIAA, which recently announced that Carey’s yuletide classic single, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” has been certified 16x Platinum.

The perennial holiday favorite — which was once again at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending Dec. 7 — has had a wild ride to its mega-platinum status. The song, which was originally released in 1994 as the lead single from the singer’s debut Christmas album, Merry Christmas, was not certified gold (500,000 copies) until December 2005.

From there, it took a decade-and-a-half for it to bump up to platinum (1 million) status in October 2019. Then the rocket ride began, with the song gaining 6x Platinum status that year, during which the track reached its highest-charting status on the Hot 100 to that point, rising to No. 3 on the chart in January 2019; by December of that year, “All I Want” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 for the first time and to date it has spent 15 weeks atop the chart.

The song hit 8X Platinum the next December and crossed the Diamond mark (10 million) by December 2021. From there, it was off the the races for the song that has been a reliable holiday No. 1 ever since, hitting 12X Platinum in December 2022, 14X Platinum in December 2023 and 16X on Friday.

Carey will need to make room for a few other new plaques as well, as her 2005 Emancipation of Mimi single “Shake It Off” reached 2X Platinum status on December 6 and her 2009 Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel lead single “Obsessed” hit 4X Platinum last week as well, 15 years after it first reached Platinum status.

Carey is in the midst of her Christmas Time tour, which is slated to hit PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Wednesday (Dec. 11); the annual holiday outing is slated to wind down on Dec. 17 with a show at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY.