Styll pushes gospel past its traditional boundaries

 

Styll pushes gospel past its traditional boundaries

Gospel Music Association President John Styll's goal is to connect all aspects of gospel music. (ALAN POIZNER. When it comes to musical styles, "gospel" can mean many different things to many different people.

It runs the gamut from traditional black gospel sung soulfully in church on Sunday mornings to the latest sounds emerging from the world of teenage Christian rock. But what binds this universe of talent together is the message, not the music.

That leaves John Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association, in the position of being a sort of agnostic — if only when it comes to musical preferences. In fact, Styll's role is to shepherd this diverse flock into the wider world of mainstream culture.

And there's no better time to do that than this week. GMA Music Week — five days of industry seminars and showcases that will bring more than 3,000 people to Nashville — kicked off yesterday and will culminate with the 37th Annual GMA Music Awards (The Doves) on Wednesday night.

Tennessean music industry reporter Ryan Underwood sat down with Styll to discuss the explosion of gospel music in Nashville and where the business is headed.

How do you differentiate between Christian and gospel music?

The marketplace answer is that gospel refers to black gospel or, if you live in the South, Southern gospel. And "Christian" has sort of been a euphemism for white music. But as the Gospel Music Association, we embrace all the styles available and refer to it all as gospel music. Our mission is to expose, promote and celebrate the Gospel through music — meaning any music that has the Gospel message in it. That can be bluegrass, or it can be rock 'n' roll.

So it really is lyrics-based as opposed to musical style?

Very definitely so.

How is gospel's business model different from the rest of the music industry?

In most respects, gospel, from a business standpoint, is very similar to the rest of the music business. It has existed as sort of a parallel universe for many years. We have the same distribution and retail issues, the same concert issues, the same radio promotion system. Although, I'd say our promotion business is a little cleaner (laughing) than it might be in other sections of the music business.

How does promotion work in the gospel music industry?

We have tens of millions of possible consumers engaged with this music every Sunday morning. I heard an estimate recently that there are 100 million people in church every week. I'm sure that's more than in all the music clubs combined, by far.

The majority of those people are fine to leave it there on Sunday morning. But more and more, they are finding that the music they enjoyed worshipping with on Sunday is something that they can have in their car CD player or at home during the week. That's a big change, and that's a big part of promotion. A lot of people hear songs for the first time at church.

So where is the music promoter's role in that? Are they trying to book churches?

They do. But that's the irony about this business. There are all these millions of consumers all together on Sunday morning, and there's no way to get to them. You can't market through churches directly. So we have to wait until they disaggregate and go out into the culture and then try to find them again.

That leaves radio still as the primary promotions vehicle. And word of mouth, Internet, these are all key ways that the music is promoted. But we don't have the same type of video promotion that the mainstream industry has.

Like CMT or MTV?

We have the Gospel Music Channel, which is terrific. But the reach is still fairly limited because they're brand-new. They're barely a year and a half old. They're actually coming onto Comcast in Nashville starting (tomorrow). That's good, and we need them.

If they were in every market, they'd be a powerful promotions vehicle. But we don't really have that yet.

Is gospel and Christian music still mostly sold by specialty retailers?

We do have specialty stores, Christian retail stores that sell books and Bibles and gifts and music. It used to be that 90% of the sales of Christian music were through those outlets. Now, it's more like 40%. Those sales have been picked up by Wal-Mart and Target and Best Buy. It's been in the last 10 years or so that that's really started to change.

And it's been aided by the fact that the major music companies — Sony BMG, Warner and EMI — acquired our main companies. Now, their distribution systems are wired into that network.

How has the involvement of the major labels with Christian music coincided with the general boom in the genre?

I think overall our sales have grown about 80% in the last 10 years or so. Maybe 15 years. We've had increased radio exposure. We've definitely had increased retail exposure and, frankly, a better product.

It used to be common to hear that Christian music was five years behind pop music. You really don't hear that anymore. Gospel has grown to become a little over 6% of the domestic record market. That's bigger than classical and jazz combined. And that's in spite of the fact that it's not really part of popular culture. Yes, things leak out every now and again. But really this is part of what you could almost call a counterculture.

Do you face the same challenges the rest of the music industry faces; namely, illegal digital downloads, declining sales?

We're facing all the same issues in microcosm. People who consume Christian music also seem to be downloading it illegally with the same frequency as anybody else — which is disturbing on a number of levels.

The difference is that some of our people claim that it's in the name of ministry, which is very inappropriate.

And yeah, we face declining sales in a very tough economic reality.

So you don't buy the whole ministry argument when it comes to downloading?

Absolutely not. Somebody once said, "The Gospel is free. But the CD will cost you $16.98." It's not up to somebody to decide that they can just take someone else's intellectual property and use it for their own purposes.

What are the demographics like for gospel music? There seem to be very different audiences.

There are. One of the elements of GMA Music Week is that it's your place to connect. We see it as a place for all these diverse elements within the business to come together and talk to each other. Retailers, radio, managers, agents, promoters, artists, record companies representing all these different genres of music. The diversity is our strength because there's something that appeals to all people.

When it comes to the Dove Awards, for example, you'll see hard-core country with Sawyer Brown. You'll see black gospel. You'll see Southern gospel quartet. You'll see rock bands. You'll see adult contemporary styles. There's a little bit of everything.

So it's more like the Grammys as opposed to the CMA Awards?

We're probably more similar to the Grammys than to any other organization. The Grammys try to represent all these diverse styles. So that's a pretty good comparison for us.

Do artists have to pick whether or not they are Christian at the outset of their career?

Not necessarily, and today less so. Today, you have more and more groups, specifically rock and alternative groups, that don't really want to be pigeonholed as a quote-unquote Christian band. They may all be believers and their lyrics may reflect that, but they don't want to be marginalized in culture or in the music business. (Bob Carlisle's) Butterfly Kisses was an example of that. Jars of Clay's Flood was an example of that. These are artists whose material just got out there into the world at large. And that's going to happen from time to time.

But, in reality, from a marketing standpoint, the way most people live their lives, they compartmentalize. And it's easier to sell something when it's labeled a certain way. So if you label this as a spiritual album or a Christian or religious record, it needs to deliver on that label.

What about someone like Matisyahu, who's emerging as a Hasidic reggae star? Would he fit into the GMA under the umbrella of spirituality?

There are not very many artists from religions outside Christianitythat wear their beliefs on their sleeve as he has. And the way he's doing it is clearly connecting with a lot of people. My observation is that he comes off as a little bit of a novelty, which I hope our folks would not.

But I think one of the things it represents in our culture is that there's probably more of a hunger on the part of the general public to have a spiritual connection to something bigger than themselves than a lot of the culture-watchers realize.

So would there be room for him in the GMA or not?

Gospel and Christian music is specifically the message of Jesus, that "I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the Father but through me." That's a pretty exclusive idea. That leaves out a theology that would contradict that.

That said, Christians are very friendly with Jews — they love Jewish people, feel in harmony with Jewish people and their traditions. Therefore, I think it's more likely for this rabbi to find a home here than for a Muslim or a devotee of an Eastern religion. That's not out of a desire not to be inclusive, because the artists who make this music want it to be a message for all people to hear. But we do have to draw a line somewhere.

When you took this position in 2003, what was your vision of what you wanted to do, where you wanted to take the organization?

Externally, I wanted to show the world that there is music according to your taste and style with a message that resonates with far more people in this world, particularly in America, than most people realize. Secondly, internally, to become as inclusive as we possibly can within our ranks. I wanted to make the folks from the black gospel world feel welcome and wanted. I wanted to make the folks from the Southern gospel world feel welcomed and wanted. That has been an ongoing process over the years.

Nashville — Williamson County in particular — seems to have become a hot spot for the gospel industry. How did that come about?

It started about 15 years ago when the large music companies started to move here. Sparrow moved here, then EMI acquired it shortly thereafter. And Word moved here from Dallas. When they came, there might not have physically been space on Music Row. So I think a lot of thepeople, like many newcomers to the area, moved into Williamson County. Not all of them, but a lot of them did. I just think there were better deals to be had out there. And there probably was a little bit of a motive not to be lumped in with country music — to be a little distinctive from that.