Christian music is booming. The genre — which is united around a common subject matter rather than a specific musical sound — has grown by 25% from 2024 to 2025, making it the second fastest growing genre in America behind rock, according to Luminate. New superstars like Forrest Frank, Brandon Lake and others are making faith-based songs cool for the TikTok generation, and the mainstream music business is clamoring to get in on the money that is to be made in Christian music.
Spotify has also found that the genre’s fanbase is also getting considerably younger — and finally adopting streaming. According to the streamer, in 2021, 39% of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) listeners were millennials or younger. Just three years later, in 2024, that number jumped to 45%.
But it’s a challenging area to navigate. Combining faith and art with making real cash often leads to sensitivities. Christian stars have struggled with how much to accept the money and fame that can come from becoming popular in this field. Last year, Frank recently decided not to participate in the genre’s version of the Grammy Awards — called the Dove Awards — saying he will “not receive a trophy for something that is from Jesus and for Jesus.”
Maverick City Music, another popular act bridging the worlds of CCM and Gospel, has also struggled with the enmeshment of business and worship. Chandler Moore, a member of the group, left in 2025 and sued the group’s CEO for allegedly stealing millions of dollars worth of royalties from him. Then, the band’s co-founder, Tony Brown, filed another lawsuit against the collective with racketeering claims over a buyout agreement, which he says was the product of threats and coercion by the group’s CEO (the lawsuit was recently dismissed, although Brown does have the option to re-file.)
In this week’s episode of Billboard’s On the Record podcast, longtime Christian rap superstar Lecrae joins to talk about the changes he’s seeing in this genre, and how he has deftly navigated the Christian music business for over two decades as both a Grammy-winning artist and independent Christian label founder.
Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here.
Christian music is kind of a subject matter rather than a genre. Can you break down for me all the different subtypes within it?
Right, exactly. If over 50% of content is referencing Christian subject matter, then it’s Christian music, technically speaking. The only kind of Christian music that has a unique sound is gospel. There are different publicist labels, radio, all those different aspects in Christian music, and in publishing, we have something called CCLI, where churches can license the music that artists write to use on Sunday mornings. A lot of Christian artists who write music make sure that their music is licensed through CCLI, and churches pay a particular fee, and it is pretty lucrative for a lot of these artists and songwriters. If we think about songs like “How Great Is Our God” and how many times that gets played on Sundays, the writer of that song is getting paid for that song every time.
It sounds like if you’re a Christian songwriter who can make a hit, you’ll be eating for life. In this genre, you can create modern-day standards. I don’t think you can get that in pop music.
Yes — for life. You’ve got to think globally. Think about how many churches there are in any given community. Just go to Kansas City, Missouri — go to Texas. Some of these churches have just gigantic congregations.
You got your start in the 2000s when there weren’t many great options for young people to listen to modern, cool Christian music. Now, it seems there’s a lot of options. Can you name an inflection point where you felt like the industry started to modernize and move toward where we are today?
I think Christian music is similar to country music in that people are very loyal — they like what they like, and they want it the way they’ve always had it. So for a long time, it was difficult to get people to transition to digital. It was like, “Oh, we want CDs. We don’t want digital.” Well, I had a younger fan base. I was on YouTube all the time creating content because that’s where my fans were. I’m young, like, “Hey, this is where we are.” So they were already inclined to stream. And that was a turning point for the Christian music industry to me.
You’ve said before that performing at summer camps and getting youth groups involved helped break you as an artist. That feels like a different approach to trying to grow as a pop artist. You’re aiming for these small influential pockets —
In the Christian music space, you start with the youth groups, and then the camps, and then there are these massive tours — radio tours that the stations put together. There are only about two Christian radio stations, and they’re syndicated around the country. So if they put a tour together, there’s all that financial backing. I did a tour called Winter Jam — the biggest Christian tour there is, and we’re doing stadiums, hitting the same venues where Drake goes, the same venues where Beyoncé goes. I saw half a million people on tour. It’s just a different reality. I would say in Christian music there’s way more loyalty. There’s a general message that’s connecting with the listener, and it’s a message that everyone is rallying around, so they’re supporting it.
I don’t want to make it sound like we’re just prostituting our faith for dollars, but what I will say is that every business is a people business. You’re always trying to figure out how to serve people and give them what they want in exchange for them paying you for your service. We just want to do good business with people. I mean, it’s an industry, it’s a business.
Christian music is booming right now. Is there increasing competition for you as a record label owner who’s trying to sign talent in this space? Are mainstream labels competing for Christian artists now?
Yes and no. Yes, the mainstream labels have indeed gone after a lot of the Christian artists and thrown bigger checks than some of us independent labels can, but the difference is they don’t understand the culture, the niche, the type of artist they should get behind. A lot of times within hip-hop in general, if a song is viral and people like it, it’ll work, but there are certain genres that are a little more nuanced, where there are some cultural things you need to know about it. Because Christian music is subject matter oriented, it’s so important to know, like, what’s the subject matter of this song, and who is this artist? Especially within the Christian hip-hop space, we’re very communal — it’s almost like you’ve got to pay your dues. There is a sense of, like, who knows you?
