In Christian music, will business bury faith?

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 12, 1999 by Robin Taylor

I'm a Christian, but I never really liked Christian music. It's not that I didn't give it a chance. In high school in the early 1980s, I was hungry for faith-filled music that spoke to me.

Somehow, I ended up with an album by the Bill Gaither Trio. I remember sitting alone in my room, desperately wanting to connect with their smooth harmonies and perky lyrics. It never happened.

Occasionally, I'd tune in to area Christian radio stations and find more of the same. It reminded me of the easy listening my parents favored, toned-down elevator versions of classic rock and pop songs. Frankly, it was depressing.

Little did I know that Christian music was about to explode. Today it commands more than $500 million in annual sales -- up 290 percent in the period 1985-94 and averaging 22 percent growth every year since 1991 (pop, rock and country have grown at only a 5 percent clip over the same time). Christian music is now the sixth most popular genre in the market, according to industry statistics.

Christians have their own nationally televised annual awards show modeled after the Grammys, called the Dove Awards, and Christian artists make regular appearances on mainstream album charts like the Billboard Top 200. According to one recent study, four out of 10 adults listen to Christian radio on a weekly basis, forming an audience of some 75-80 million people -- a tremendous market for Christian musicians.

Visit your neighborhood Christian book store, and music -- all kinds of music -- abounds. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, Sam Goody and Borders have increased their Christian album selections, too; they accounted for nearly half of all Christian music sales in 1997.

Glance through the shelves, and you'll find Christian swing. Christian ska. Christian rap. Christian country. Christian urban music. Christian hip-hop. Christian alternative. Christian heavy metal. No matter what kind of popular music you favor, there's a Christian version available today.

Experts cite a variety of forces behind this growth, including an expanding Christian fan base, an inspirational message that is "more consistent with societal trends and consumer attitudes," increased exposure through mainstream media, creative marketing strategies and the takeover of formerly independent Christian record labels by mainstream companies.

Of all these factors, it's mostly the corporate investment in Christian music that has fueled the recent surge in profits -- if not always prophets.

The trend is perhaps best illustrated by the "WoW" album series. These double-CD sets premiered with a 1996 edition and claim to feature the year's 30 top Christian artists and songs. They've sold more than a million copies, and the just-released 1999 version has sat solidly on the Billboard 200 album chart for weeks now, powering in at number 12 on the 1998 Christian year-end best-seller list.

The artists featured are the heavy-hitters of Christian music: Amy Grant, who has four of the top 10 best-selling Christian albums of all time, Michael W. Smith, Grammy winners Jars of Clay and dc Talk, and Bob Carlisle, of "Butterfly Kisses," fame, who was the first Christian artist to have an album hit number one on the Billboard 200 sales chart.

The 1998 WoW CD boasts that it had "music that can make an eternal difference." The 1999 jacket says that "over the past three years, millions of people have had their lives affected by the music from the WoW projects. We're convinced that there's something here that can change your life."

Such sweeping claims are hard to verify. More clear is that however life-changing a message may be, getting on the WoW CD is just as much about contacts and contracts. All the CD's artists are distributed by the three major Christian market distributors: EMI Christian Music Group, which is owned by EMI Music Worldwide; Word Entertainment, which is owned by the Gaylord Corporation; and Provident Music Group, which is owned by the Zomba Group.

Along with its Christian branch, EMI owns both Chrysalis and Virgin Records and sponsors artists including Iron Maiden and Chumbawamba. Gaylord says it's proud of its Word artists. It's also proud of its business ventures that include the Opryland Music Group, the Opryland Hotel, and the Wildhorse Saloon. Zomba is an international corporation that bills itself on one of its Web sites as "the world's leading and largest independent music company." Together, these three distributors were responsible for more than 90 percent of Christian record sales in 1998.

Given such access to corporate deep pockets, Christian artists can tap distribution channels (and, hence, make money) that Sunday morning gospel singers could only have dreamed of even a decade ago.

dc Talk's latest album, "Supernatural," was released under both the Christian label ForeFront and to general market outlets through Virgin Records. Band members say that the record will have a bigger impact with the cross market release, that "Virgin is just a bigger cannon that's able to shoot the record out there."