Grace on Christian Rock Chart Options

[SJN1279]

Just found this:

Grace is currently at #27 on the Christian Rock chart in the US. It debuted 3 weeks ago. Very cool!

http://secure.randr.com/bdsradiocharts/cha...=610&height=500

[jaybb]

Yeah, so I wasn't really trying to make a negative statement about going to Church every week. More along the lines that the Christian music market, compared to the other genres, is pretty small and there is not a lot of cross-over (sure there's some, as discussed earlier), but for the most part, nobody in the mainstream music industry looks to the Christian charts to gauge any sort of success. It is a very locked-in market. You have some bands that venture into it, but the majority of bands who start there don't make it to the mainstream (a couple notable exceptions, but very few) and are only listened to by people who are very involved in religious activities. Consequently, to mainstream marketing executives, a mainstream artist who is charting high (Top 10+) on the Christian chart is an added bonus, but it's nothing to jump for joy about. Christian artists/labels are different, as they are much smaller and their measure of success is also much smaller.

My original comment was more along the lines of he was once part of a major band that charted on the most important of charts. Being #27 on the Christian Rock chart is sort of like going as far backwards as possible. It's like saying a guy that once headlined on the stage at Lollapalooza is now playing on the Kidapalooza stage (oh wait, that's true). It's not a good statistic. If the story was "This legendary rocker has a single called Grace that is skyrocketing its way up the Christian charts... it's up to #5 now," then it might be worth some discussion and would be encouraging enough for the label to throw some extra dollars at the release to keep the momentum. Alas, it seems like its barely made a blip, on any chart of note, after three weeks.

With figures like these (even though Nick likes to tout them as measures of success; they're figures of disappointment), I'm sure the label is about to declare this album dead, domestically. It'll be great for him to sell 50 copies or whatever per show, but as far as the label is concerned, no reason to spend more on him in the US.

It really doesn't matter if he's signed to a Christian label or not. Most major labels have Christian subsidiaries anyways and if a label feels they can make in-roads into the Christian community with a particular mainstream artist, they will work with their subsidiary to do so. If it's a smaller label with no subsidiary, hire an marketing & PR agency that focuses solely on outreach to this community -- which there are a lot of.

This post has been edited by jaybb: Aug 6 2010, 10:30 pm