The Christian music scene is in a strange place at the moment. I wrote last year that one of the reasons congregational singing is in decline is that songwriters were writing more for an audience than for a congregation. ‘Song writers have got into the habit of writing for the market or label rather than for the people of God.’
The reason for this is straightforward. As soon as you create a music label, you quickly have to rely on the market which buys in to your label. This means that it becomes more important to write songs which ‘sell’ well than ones which congregations actually enjoy singing together. It also creates a ‘pop chart’ culture, whereby each song has its day in the sun until tastes change. You then have to write another song, which you hope can sustain the momentum of the label. In my experience, songwriters tend to do this using the ‘blunderbuss’ technique, whereby we’re blasted by a load of second-rate songs in the hope that one finds the target.
Label wars?
What has begun to happen (in my perception) is that each label has had to promote its own songs, while ignoring the output of other labels. This is because there is such pressure to keep your own label going that other Christian songwriters are seen as competition. To illustrate, I went to a huge music event last month, where I was concerned to see that there were no copyright details included on the screens showing the words to the songs. It didn’t take me long to realise that the copyright details weren’t needed because the musicians were only playing their own songs. We sang no other song written by any other label for the whole day, even though we sang at least four hours-worth of songs over the day. Moreover, because I hadn’t been moving in the circles which sang these songs, I felt completely out of touch, and definitely an observer rather than a partaker. I headed out of the doors during the last set of songs straight into a mid-life crisis.
