The Future Of the CCM Industry

Charlie Peacock has an outstanding analysis of the future of the CCM industry. Go read the whole thing when you have a minute, but I wanted to throw a few excellent quotes out there:

Christian music’s alliances with mainstream entertainment corporations will all prove eternally less than successful, since they all bet first on the power of the market to deliver results and not the hand of God—something God has never been fond of. (See Bible for evidence.)

This has been a common complaint about the state of the industry. Steve Camp has said similar things in the past. The problem as I see it started when we stopped thinking of Christian music as a ministry and started thinking of it as an industry. If it's an industry, you partner with whoever will help your bottom line. If it's a ministry, you realize that your bottom line has nothing to do with money.

When convenient or strategic, Christian artists will return to using the term gospel in order to describe their music. “Ccm” has faded as an accurate moniker and will disappear altogether.

I've seen this already. Artists are either using the 'gospel' label or they describe their music in terms of "secular" genre tags like "emo" or "metal" or "hardcore" -- things like that. There are increasingly few Christian artists who identify themselves as CCM artists; many don't even self-identify as Christian, even those who are explicitly so lyrically and ministerially. If you don't believe me, browse through MySpace. There are still some artists who self-identify as Christian, and some of those are quite good, but by and large the major acts don't do it, whether out of frustration with the industry or because they are trying to be accepted first as musicians, or perhaps some less noble reason.

Christian music with “worldview” lyrics is dead in the church and reborn in the world where Christian indie and major label artists will carry the torch. The majority of Christian music fans and gatekeepers in the church proved too immature or disinterested to discern whether or not a lyric was speaking to a topic from a Christian worldview. The problem of maturity and literacy will continue.

And podcasters will lead the way. Take a listen to The Bored Again Christian or The Habanero Hour for some Christian worldview music that you won't hear anywhere else. And, of course, you can check out The PewCast too. I play a different genre than Just Pete or Brent play is all. But I think that this is the wisest thing that Peacock says, "... the real and trustworthy future of Christian music is Christ. Find out what He’s interested in, and let that be the music’s future." Posted by Warren Kelly at May 16, 2008 08:26 PM | TrackBack