Updated with new pages added September - October 2006.
Mission House Music and Undone Recordings added June 2007. Manna Records updated.

INTRODUCTION

This directory centralizes available information for many Christian record labels and companies. Both currently active labels and those which are history are included.

Discographies on the web for older labels are incomplete at best. Where available, links are provided to the best source: BSN (Both Sides Now) Publications.

It should be noted that many Christian recordings were also released in the 50s, 60s and 70s by mainstream labels such as RCA, Capitol and Columbia. These labels are not included in this section. Neither are custom artist labels.


THE BUSINESS TODAY

With the commercial success of Christian music in the 80s and 90s as it moved more and more into contemporary pop music styles, secular recording companies became interested in ownership. And the major Christian record companies saw good reason to sell and pitched their product as the ‘next big music thing.’

It seemed to be a win-win situation: The Christian labels would get large financial pockets for production and publicity and most important, mainstream distribution to stores like BestBuy, Target, Kmart and Walmart. In return, the mainstream record companies would reap the bottom line.

Today the ‘Christian big 3’ are owned by 3 of the ‘big 4’ mainstream record companies: Word Entertainment is owned by the Warner Music Group,  Sparrow by EMI, and the Provident Music Group (Brentwood, Reunion) by Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Also, there are now more independent (indies) Christian labels then ever, many of whom use the distribution capabilities of the major Christian labels.

With the acquisition of Columbia House by BMG in 2005, Columbia House’s Power & Glory and BMG’s Sound & Spirit Christian music clubs are now the Christian music division of BMG Music Service.

• According to the Gospel Music Association (GMA), Christian/Gospel music sales rose from $188 million in 1990 to over $700 million annually.

• Over 54.2 million units of CDs, cassettes, digital albums and digital tracks were sold in 2006.

• Christian/Gospel albums accounted for 6.75% of all album sales in 2006.

Source: GMA 2007 Industry Overview [.PDF]
[The Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™ for PDF files is a free download.]



This page last updated June 17, 2007.
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