Tara Isabella Burton

Yes.

Like Amy Grant.

Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith.

I mean, names that people might not know anymore, but those are like...

the big names.

Its growth coincided with this kind of moment of cultural panic that brought together a lot of white evangelicals, think moral majority moment, politically speaking.

And this industry really rose up because it offered an alternative to MTV, an alternative to hot radio.

You had parents that were worried, oh, the teens are listening to this music that has all this objectionable content.

Here is this kind of clean Christian version of it.

Well, there have been multiple surges in CCM.

So these like crossover moments, there've been multiple of them over the past three decades.

So Amy Grant would be one.

In the early 2000s, if we were having this conversation, we'd be having it about Switchfoot and a couple of like Christian rock bands.

And you'll remember that like Switchfoot had this moment where, you know, they were on the soundtrack to this Mandy Moore movie, A Walk to Remember.

Yeah.

There was this moment in the 2000s where you had Christian bands that were making a lot of inroads in alternative rock music.

And those scenes were really closely tied together.

But we didn't have streaming yet.

So this is the first time post-streaming we've had this moment of breakthrough for Christian music into the mainstream.

And we're seeing a lot more data about that than we have been in the past.