Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

All I want for Christmas is a number one hit

For nearly three decades, Mariah Carey has been the queen of Christmas music. Her 1994 hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is one of the most successful digital singles of all-time – seasonal and otherwise – and continues to chart every year, holding the U.S. record for longest gap between release date and going number one (25 years) – until now, that is.

This year, Brenda Lee’s classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” supplanted Carey atop the charts and broke her record, rising to number one 65 years after it was released. As she turned 79, Lee became the oldest person to go number one. If she had topped the charts when the track arrived in 1958 – her playful Georgian drawl belying her 13 years of age at the time – she would’ve also been the youngest.

So how did it happen? There was a new music video, for one, but a lot of Lee’s fresh momentum arrived when she created a TikTok account . . .

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