A podcast script about the money behind holiday music, written by a team from Melissa High School, is the only Texas entry the Federal Reserve chose to publish from this year's High School Fed Challenge, Melissa ISD said Friday.
The Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Dallas and Richmond run the competition, now in its 32nd year. School teams sent in 207 papers, and Fed reviewers picked 12 for the 2026 Journal of Future Economists, according to the district.
The Melissa team was made up of two seniors, a sophomore and a former student who is now a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.
Christmas songs as an economics lesson
Every entry had to fit this year's theme, the economics of music. Teams research the topic and then present it as a podcast script rather than a standard paper. The journal's contents list Melissa High under the Dallas Fed's Eleventh District, alongside schools from states including New Jersey, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri and Virginia.
The Melissa script, titled "All I Want for Chri$tmas Is Revenue: The Economics of Xmas Music," begins on page 84. Its student hosts trace how Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" turned nostalgia into sales, then turn to how seasonal music in stores can change what shoppers spend.
They use Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" as their case study and cite an industry estimate that Christmas music earned about $88 million in Spotify royalties in a single holiday season. A note in the journal says the interviews in the script are imagined.
