The Globalization of Gospel Music 3
According to the Gospel Music Association statistics generated in the summer of 2015:
Christian and gospel music … enjoys [a] reach that touches into every demographic group, accounting for 215 million people who listened to the genre within the past month…. [It] also shows that 68 percent of Americans listened to Christian or gospel music within the past thirty days. The genre is especially popular with African Americans, with 93 percent having listened to gospel within the past year.
And just like its secular counterparts, Christian and gospel music has been propelled in popularity by its placement in mainstream pop culture, notably on reality television shows and in films.
(Rau 2015, n.p.)
What follows are some of the key points to take away from the Gospel Music Association research:
- 215 million people listened to Christian music during one month in 2015.
- 68 percent of Americans listened to Christian music during one month in 2015.
- 93 percent of African Americans, or more than 38 million people, listened to gospel radio in the past year.
- Of Christian music enthusiasts, 53 percent are female, 47 percent are male, and 23 percent are females ages twenty-five to forty-four.
- Adult contemporary accounts for 33.8 percent of Christian music sales by genre, gospel accounts for 17.6 percent, praise and worship accounts for 13.6 percent, rock accounts for 11.5 percent, and Southern gospel accounts fors 5.5 percent.
- The following Christian and gospel artists have appeared on reality TV: Kirk Franklin on BET's "Sunday Best," Mary Mary on WEtv's "Mary Mary," Kierra Sheard on BET's "The Sheards," and Ben Tankard on Bravo's "Thicker Than Water."
- Christian and Gospel accounts for 6.6 percent of music sales in the United States as a percentage of the overall market, Latin accounts for 2.5 percent, jazz accounts for 2.4 percent, classical accounts for 2.4 percent, and blues accounts for 0.9 percent (Rau 2015, n.p.).
According to Jason Joven, manager of Music Data Insights at Chartmetric, who has an eye for cultural insights and data analytics, gospel music was on the rise in 2020. "Taking its Top 100 artists by growth throughout 2020, gospel grew nearly 40 percent in YouTube Channel Views (2.2B to 3.1B views overall). For perspective, that edges out country (34 percent) and CCM (38 percent), though rap's growth is nearly double that of gospel's (76 percent) and pop's growth is more than 4x that of gospel's (177%). See chart below for comparisons" (Joven 2021, n.p.).
In this brief overview of global gospel music from Dorsey to the present, we see that gospel music has impacted other countries and other cultural groups. Likewise, other musicians, especially on the African continent, are recording their brand of gospel, which has made its way back to America. For some gospel artists, gospel music in the twenty-first century is a realignment and synthesis of its earlier musical roots, emphasizing catering to a divergent market for parishioners. In this context, some artists are careful not to upset their parishioners by bringing into the liturgy the music that is considered inappropriate to Christian musical values (Lawton 2016, n.p.). Others have forged ahead with their driving and pulsating rhythms accompanied by a textual message relevant to the times.
At different points in time, musicians were ostracized from the church for playing new styles of music that were deemed inappropriate. Often, these musicians picked themselves up from the proverbial curb of the church from which they were just kicked and took those new styles into the secular world. Over time, these innovations were eventually accepted and invited back into the church, creating a pathway between the church and the secular music world and popular culture.
(Guess 2018, 3)
