Where Do You Get New Worship Music From?

Last month I conducted a poll on Twitter, my web site and my blog asking everyone who wanted to participate, "Where do you get your new worship songs from?". By the way, thanks to everyone who responded to the survey.

I must say, at first the results seemed slightly surprising. But as I started to think about how I connect with new worship material, it started to make a whole lot more sense.

 

The poll shows that the majority of people get their new worship songs from their favorite artists. If I was a betting man, I might have placed money on Radio or Compilation CD's (such as WOW, Passion, etc.). My initial reasoning for this is as follows: as a worship leader you are forced to lead songs which people LIKE, and most importantly, KNOW. Lots of people know and still like, DAYS OF ELIJAH (by the way Robin Mark, awesome song, but after the first 5000 times, "behold he comes" needs a break in my rotation. It's nothing personal.)

So I took a second and started thinking about the most recent songs I've added to my repitiore as a worship leader. I'm a personal fan of Hillsong, Chris Tomlin, Paul Baloche (amoung many, many others). "Mighty to Save", "Holy is the Lord", and "Our God Saves" (respectively) are somewhat (within the last few years) recent worship favorites of mine. Hmmm, interesting pattern.

Yes, each of these songs did get lots of radio spins on Christian radio (including Canada too, for all you Americans out there), however, that is not why I added them. In fact, their radio life was long past by the time I got around to adding them to my set list (with the exception of "Mighty to Save", which has been covered by a bazillion artists). I hear tons and tons of songs on the radio. That's partially part of my job as an artist, to stay on top of that sort of thing. I added these songs, because I like the artist. And, because I have a connection with that artist, the song means so much more to me.

This information is very helpful to me. If I were a young (not a requirement), independent, worship artist (ahem), and my goal was to write a song that people are able to enter into worhsip with, I now know that radio, compilation CD's, and CCLI are probably NOT what I want to focus my resources on (assuming the above mentioned is my ONLY goal). Rather, I might need to spend some time developing relationships with fellow worshippers (and fans), to become a "favorite artist" (which by the way, does NOT necessarily mean "most popular artist").

DISCLAIMER -- when deciding when, where and how to allocate your resources (time, money, people, assets, abilities, etc.), make sure you develop (and continually evantuate/update) your short/long term goals. The above mentioned is just one (very specific) example and does NOT apply to all scenarios as an artist.

Does anyone else have any comments on this topic?