Elias Light

Billboard ran a piece back in May about how there were two Christian artists on the Hot 100 simultaneously, which hadn't happened in a really long time.

And then also there's a kind of a separate data company called Luminate, and they publish twice a year reports on kind of listening behavior and tracking how different genres are doing.

And in two consecutive reports, they sort of flagged that Christian music was growing really fast.

So that kind of got me intrigued that maybe it was something to dive into.

How popular has Christian music gotten?

What was the data that was really drawing you in?

Yeah, so I think there were two kind of key points.

One is there were these two songs that were both on the Hot 100, one by Forrest Frank.

And the other by this guy, Brandon Lake.

It's still like a relatively small genre compared to pop or hip hop, but it's been expanding really quickly.

And it's not that far away now from electronic dance music in the US, which is what, you know, kind of what we think of as one of the big traditional genres.

Yeah, definitely.

So like when Luminate talks about sort of tracking the growth of the space overall, they kind of lump all the Christian faith based stuff together.

So it's both the gospel and the contemporary Christian music, which is what they kind of call the other wing of that space.

But my article focused more on the latter just because that's where right now you've seen kind of these big artists make kind of mainstream gains like a Forrest Frank, like a Brandon Lake.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it varies a lot, but I think a lot of what you're seeing in this new wave is they, you know, they don't really want their stuff to be like pigeonholed as worship music that's only for church.

You know, like Forrest Frank talked about this.

He used to make secular music.

He started making Christian music.