• By
  • Hannah Karp
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Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Elvis all sold millions of holiday-themed albums and singles—perhaps most famously Mr. Crosby’s 1941 recording of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”

A successful Christmas album can become an evergreen seller, helping an artist stay commercially relevant without writing new music. And holiday records can also help artists expand their fan base beyond those in their usual genre.

They can also represent easy money: Many carols are so old that they are in the public domain, meaning that artists who perform them get compensated as though they’d written the songs themselves. That means royalties come in every time their version of the song airs on the radio. Typically performing artists don’t earn money from airplay unless they’ve written the song.

But most acts only take one crack at the holiday record, making it hard to predict sales in a given year, given the unpredictability of the lineup.

Holiday music grew from 3.2% of total U.S. sales in 2008 to 4.2% in 2011, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Last year the category declined to 3.8%. The top selling album in the genre, Rod Stewart’s “Merry Christmas Baby,” sold fewer than 858,000 copies. The percentage is likely to slip again this year, said Nielsen’s entertainment analyst Dave Bakula, based on sales so far.