By Cassimir Medford

A digital mastertone of Mariah Carey’s 12-year-old holiday classic All I Want for Christmas Is You became the first-ever clip from a Christmas song to sell 500,000 units and be certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, according to Sony BMG’s Legacy Recordings.

All I Want for Christmas Is You

In fact, Ms. Carey’s hit song was the first and only mastertone of a Christmas song to achieve RIAA certification—a remarkable achievement considering the immense popularity of old standards such as Santa Baby and Nat King Cole’s classic, The Christmas Song.

The Christmas Song

It is this kind of performance the music industry is banking on in the digital arena if it is to get out of its five-year slump in which revenue from digital products such as mastertones and ringtones is not growing fast enough to make up for losses in CD sales.

A mastertone is an actual clip of a song taken from the master, while ringtones are usually polyphonic snippets of the song. Both are used primarily in cell phones.

Mariah’s Digital Rebirth

All I Want for Christmas Is You was originally released in 1994 on Ms. Carey’s 1994 Merry Christmas album. The album has demonstrated a very long tail. It has sold 11 million copies worldwide, earning 5x platinum certification.

The album has been reincarnated as a digital hit, moving to No. 24 on the SoundScan Digital Albums chart. The single is currently No. 9 on the SoundScan Top 200 Hot Digital Tracks chart.

Another song from the album Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) just entered that digital chart at No. 171.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

The music industry overall is in a persistent downturn. Revenues are leveling off or dropping, and income from digital products is not growing fast enough to replace losses from physical assets such as CDs.

Mobile Trouble

Revenues at Ms. Carey’s former recording home Sony BMG remained flat in the most recent quarter at $948 million. That was a 1 percent increase, due largely to currency fluctuations.

Parent company Sony posted a net profit of $14 million in the most recent quarter, a 94 percent drop from the same period last year.

Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., one of the respected voices in the industry, said last week that he expects mobile music and mobile music videos to be major growth engines in the global industry (see Bronfman Does Mobile Dance).

Bronfman Does Mobile Dance

But Warner Music has seen some troubling fluctuations in overall growth and in the flagging growth in digital sales.

The problem is universal in the music industry, and despite the digital rejuvenation of Ms. Carey’s Merry Christmas album, the industry is hoping for a stocking filled with many more digital stories like Ms. Carey’s.