genre report
When Luminate reported the fastest-growing music genres in the first half of 2024 (through the week of May 30), contemporary Christian music (CCM)/gospel unexpectedly placed in the top five. When analyzing overall consumption — track-equivalent albums, stream-equivalent albums and on-demand audio — the genre grew 8.9%, more than twice the overall industry growth rate of 3.9% for the same period in 2023.
CCM/gospel’s rise is even stronger on Spotify. Representatives for the platform say the genre has grown 30% in the United States and more than 30% globally in the past year. Over the past five years, the genre has grown 50% stateside and 60% globally.
“This past March alone, the Christian and gospel genre had its biggest streaming month on Spotify ever,” says Maritza “Ritz” McCain, Spotify’s senior editor, Christian and gospel.
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McCain also points to CCM/gospel’s global reach, noting that while the United States is the largest market for Christian music, global consumption is expanding in markets that include Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and the Philippines. She also cites promising growth in markets such as India, Indonesia and Germany.
According to Luminate, the top five CCM/gospel acts for 2024’s first half were Elevation Worship, Lauren Daigle, Phil Wickham, Hillsong Worship and Brandon Lake. Elevation Worship’s song “Praise,” featuring Lake, Chris Brown — a different Chris Brown from the “Run It” singer — and Chandler Moore, is the biggest CCM hit of 2024 thus far, having spent 24 weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart.
Cole Flynn, head of marketing at Elevation Worship Records, attributes “six or seven” different factors that have contributed to the shift. For one, the consumption and promotion of CCM by a new generation of social media-savvy fans on those platforms is attracting new listeners.
“This whole generation has grown up with Spotify and Apple Music, and with the ability to access any kind of music they want to hear at any point in time,” says Leigh Holt of Hsquared Management, which manages Daigle and Riley Clemmons. “The barriers have been broken. There are more people who can say, ‘These are the ways I want to express my faith.’”
According to Luminate Insights, the share of listeners who are millennials and younger grew from 39% of overall genre listenership in 2022 to 45% in 2024. Additionally, the number of hours that CCM/gospel fans spent with music each month increased from 47.9 hours to 56.8 so far in 2024 — a 19% increase.
“Worship music does skew younger, agewise and listenerwise,” Flynn says. “People in their 20s and 30s are listening to Elevation Worship, whereas a typical Christian radio audience might be a little older.” He adds that this evolution has necessitated changes in marketing strategies for Elevation Worship, as it has with other CCM/gospel artists. “We’ve released music a little earlier, teased it out a little earlier, tried to get the music in people’s minds and on their phones earlier and give away a little more of the master content than we would have five years ago.”
Lauren Daigle
Jeremy Cowart
A new crop of young talent — who are also social media natives — includes 29-year-old Forrest Frank, 21-year-old Josiah Queen and 24-year-old Seph Schlueter. Frank’s “Good Day” and Schlueter’s “Counting My Blessings” each reached No. 2 on the Hot Christian Songs chart, with the former making its way into the upper echelons of Spotify’s Viral 50 chart this year. And Queen’s “The Prodigal” was in the top 15 on the Christian Airplay chart. All three are nominees for new artist of the year at the Gospel Music Association’s Dove Awards in October.
Queen’s debut album, also named The Prodigal, and Frank’s Child of God both debuted at No. 1 on the Top Christian Albums chart in July and August, respectively, and the latter ascended to No. 28 on the Billboard 200.
Like artists in other genres, many top sellers in CCM/ gospel make social media key to their marketing plans. Daigle, 32, has over 5 million monthly Spotify listeners, and videos of concert moments, shared on TikTok, earn millions of views. Elevation Worship has over 1.9 million TikTok followers, and one March TikTok post of its hit “Praise” has garnered more than 19 million views. Brandon Lake, 34, who has over 4 million monthly Spotify listeners, has attracted 4.3 million views since posting a TikTok video in July that used his song “That’s Who I Praise.” And Frank racked up over 9 million views with a video that uses his “Good Day.”
“Content is still king,” Holt says. “The artists who are winning are the artists who are the most authentic on social media. Even with Elevation Worship, their content is very ‘man on the street,’ very accessible to everyone. I feel like that has a lot to do with the growth, as well as fans having insight into artists’ lives. Forrest Frank is great on social media, and Josiah Queen is really fun — he kind of teaches a master class a bit on that. They’ve figured out social media in a very organic way.”
Unlike most genres, CCM/gospel is built around a central message rather than a particular sound, allowing for a greater range of musical styles, including the pop of for King & Country and Frank; Queen’s rustic, singer-songwriter style; Tauren Wells’ pop/R&B vibe; and Lecrae’s rap.
“The expansion of what Christian and gospel music sounds like has helped grow the listenership and, in turn, the consumption of the genre,” McCain says. “Artists like Lauren Daigle, NF and Montell Fish started with a Christian listener base and have grown to see success in broader audiences.” She adds that the inclusion of Christian/gospel artists on non-faith-based playlists such as R&B Weekly, Shine and Fresh Folk has also helped to expand the genre’s reach.
Also bolstering CCM/gospel’s presence are a number of recent collaborations with secular artists, including for King & Country with Timbaland, TobyMac with Sheryl Crow, Lecrae with John Legend, Anne Wilson with Lainey Wilson, Zach Williams with Dolly Parton and CeCe Winans with Carrie Underwood.
“It’s way easier to become a fan of one person and transfer that fandom to another, especially with great collaborations,” Holt says. “For King & Country has always kind of led the way in the Christian space, and that really brings different spotlights to the genre.”
As streaming consumption and social media promotion of CCM/gospel music have increased, so has the number of contemporary Christian radio stations in the United States. According to stationratings.com, the number of U.S. stations carrying the contemporary Christian format rose by 22 from July 2023 to July 2024.
Titan Christian radio chains K-LOVE and Air1, which are owned by the non-profit Educational Media Foundation (EMF) have more than 1,000 broadcast signals. So far this year, the company has added more than a dozen signals to its fold.
“We’ve seen direct correlations of [streaming] consumption mirror the amount of audience we’re getting at radio,” Flynn says of Elevation Worship. “At the top of the radio chart, their song ‘Praise’ gets an audience of 10 million a week — that’s a massive difference. Let’s say radio doesn’t drive direct streams, which is an argument these days. It does drive massive awareness. There’s an intangible with church listeners, worship leaders, people putting it in Sunday morning [church services] set lists that exponentially grow that reach beyond radio, but that might have been the first place they heard it. So [radio]’s a huge help for us when we’re trying to get a song out there.”
“The songs coming out of our community continue to impact our audience, not only across all digital platforms but on terrestrial radio to over 30 million weekly listeners,” Gospel Music Association president Jackie Patillo said in a statement provided to Billboard. “People are hungry for a message that encourages and inspires.”
Growth in streaming, social media and radio reach ultimately impact artists’ touring. Elevation Worship sold out its spring Elevation Nights ’24 Tour before it began, averaging 11,600 tickets sold each night. Meanwhile, Holt says Daigle’s Kaleidoscope Tour has also seen growth in ticket sales.
“It’s a very different market now for ticket buying, post-pandemic, with multiple tours out. There’s a lot of competition,” Holt says. “But our ticket sales have grown this year, and we are back to our pre-pandemic numbers, which has been exciting to see.”
In 1995, Peter Shapiro purchased the New York club Wetlands. “That was the home of the jam band, Grateful Dead scene in New York,” he recalls. At the time, though, “it wasn’t cool to be a Deadhead. And Wetlands wasn’t necessarily the cool play.”
But styles that were frowned upon by one generation are often taken up by the next. While many artists — and the mainstream music business — ignored jam bands for years, this has started to change. Intrigued by the scene’s genre-hopping open-mindedness and the unwavering devotion of its followers at a time when “superfan” is the industry buzzword of choice, the rest of the music business has started to take an interest in a space it long kept at arm’s length.
“If you’re a pop artist, and you see a bunch of bearded weirdo hippies able to do whatever they want on their own terms, that’s an appealing path to think about,” says Mike Luba, longtime manager of the String Cheese Incident.
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At festivals, “you’re seeing jam bands pop up on lineups that are traditionally more indie rock or haven’t really touched the jam thing in the past,” explains Dave DiCianni, who co-manages Goose along with other jam bands like Eggy and Pigeons Playing Ping Pong. “It’s cool to see it permeating into general pop culture,” he adds.
The Big Bang for jam bands, according to Shapiro, was the death of the Dead’s Jerry Garcia in 1995. “Everyone saw the Dead; they were the number one touring band in the 1990s,” Shapiro continues. “Garcia dies, and that audience of live music, improvisation-loving people splinters. That creates the jam band scene. Phish lifts up” — the band first cracked Pollstar‘s highest grossing U.S. tours list at the end of 1994 — “along with String Cheese Incident, Disco Biscuits, Medeski Martin and Wood,” and more.
Over the years, groups associated with the scene “will pop in and out of mainstream pop culture,” Luba says, pointing to Rusted Root and the Spin Doctors. But many of the acts in this space were overlooked, if not dismissed outright, by the mainstream music industry, in part because they didn’t generate chart hits or millions of streams, even as they moved lots of tickets. Nick Stern, whose management client Karina Rykman is “jam adjacent,” contends that the jam scene is “the most looked down-upon genre in the music business.”
For some artists, that gives it an inherent underdog appeal: “I’m interested in things that are unfashionable,” Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig told The New York Times Magazine in 2020. He also noted that he finds Phish “more inspiring, forward-thinking, exciting and talented than a lot of what was higher up in the cool hierarchy;” Vampire Weekend recently hopped on stage with Goose, the new arena-filling stars of the jam scene.
Jam acts may also be benefitting from the catholic tastes fostered in the streaming era — as DiCianni puts it, listeners’ interests are now “less compartmentalized.” And artists and managers in the jam band scene posit that its emphasis on being present, in the moment, with a like-minded community for an ever-changing live experience offers an increasingly potent antidote to the distracted, frenetic, nichified, social media-driven world.
But there’s another reason why the mainstream music industry is increasingly interested in jam acts. “People outside the jam band space are coming to me almost in awe of the fandom in this scene,” says Ben Baruch, Goose’s other co-manager.
In interviews over the last six months, many of the most powerful executives in music have talked up the importance of cultivating “superfans.” Despite music’s popularity, it is poorly monetized compared to spaces like gaming. This is partially because the music streaming model currently offers artists few ways to foster meaningful connections with followers. Jam bands have been doing this for decades — perhaps because they didn’t get much support from the traditional industry, and have never depended on record sales or streaming.
Jam band devotees are impressively diligent about attending shows, buying merchandise, and streaming live performances, which change nightly. “They almost treat their favorite bands like a sports team, where they’re following along with what happens in every moment in every show,” says Ethan Berlin, who is co-agent for Goose, Pigeons and Rykman, among others. “They’re so invested — for years.”
And these fans have long had “ears that are a mile wide,” according to Rykman. At a time when the walls between the jam world and the rest of the music industry appear more porous, jam enthusiasts have flexed their muscles to help propel some artists from adjacent worlds to greater heights.
Take Billy Strings: The versatile guitarist and songwriter, now signed to Warner’s Reprise Records, has picked up Grammy nominations for Best American Roots Performance and Best Country Duo/Group Performance; he won the award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2021. At the same time, Strings has played with Bill Kreutzmann (a founding member of the Dead), String Cheese Incident and Goose, among others. He saw “there’s another whole world where traditional bluegrass can actually cross over and be accepted,” Luba says. Strings’ current tour includes multiple arenas.
Berlin is also the agent for Khruangbin, a trio whose dreamy instrumental grooves now attract 10,000 to 25,000 tickets per market; Berlin describes them as “not quite jam, maybe not even jam-adjacent, but definitely jam-friendly.” Notably, “they were embraced by that scene early in their career, ” he continues. “One of the first looks they had outside of Houston, where they’re from, was when they were invited to play Lockn’ Festival [one of the leading jam gatherings] in 2016.”
For Rykman, whose 2023 debut album featured guitar from Phish co-founder Trey Anastasio, this is one of “the beautiful things about the jam space.” “Myself, Khruangbin, Vulfpeck, we’re not jam bands with capital J’s — none of us play two sets, we still play three-minute songs,” she continues. “But jam band fans were early” to signal appreciation.
Similarly minded artists — what Rykman calls “singular groovy organisms” — might also want to court this community — music-loving superfans hiding in plain sight who can help them build the sort of formidable live business that ensures a long career. Another one of Baruch’s management clients is the Disco Biscuits; in the past 18 months, he says “they’re growing more than they have in 20 years.”
“What musician wouldn’t want that level of diehard fan?” Berlin asks.
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