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I was gone most of the week to the Wilds camp in North Carolina at a music conference. For those of you that don't know, this conference attracts primarily conservative church musicians. There were probably about 350 people there.
I was encouraged this week. First of all, I got to finally meet in person many people that I have talked online with over the past few years. I also met many new people and caught up with old friends. Networking is far and away the most valuable benefit of these kinds of events.
It is always exhilarating to run into people whom I have never seen who enjoy my music. Thanks to the so many of you who came up during the week and told me that.
In sitting through the reading sessions, I was impressed with the quality of the music that is being written for church. It is getting far better. Conservative publishers have long lagged the larger, mainstream publishers in terms of quality but that is changing. Soundforth for example seems to have made big strides over the past few years.
I could be wrong, but I think there is a clear reason for this improvement, and that leads me to another thing that encouraged me. The new leaders in conservative Christian music are more balanced and more thoughtful. They care just as much about music being godly but they have largely rejected the silliness that has characterized much of the teaching about music over the last decades in conservative Christian churches. Their music reflects this fact.
Frankly, I was impressed that music standards rarely even came up in the services/workshops. I am convinced that we have more important things to worry about than unprovable music standards (preferences) that are completely non-Biblical and have hurt the quality of our music. We have obsessed about such trivialities long enough while ignoring the real problems in our circles. So, the teaching on other things was very welcome.
As an exhibitor and performer (thanks to the Wilds for inviting me), I spent a lot of time with other music professionals (publishers, writers, and artists). My tendency is to examine business models, and I found myself critiquing what I saw. In general, the conservative church movement is quite small and most who are trying to earn a living in that niche are obviously struggling.
One company's business model impressed me. Church Works Media has simple strategy: give away everything for free. They have a quality product, but when combined with the free strategy, their brand growth is impressive. To those that are struggling, remember that short term money usually comes at the expense of long time viability. It is better to give away 50 CDs to the right people than sell 50 CDs at full price to anyone you can convince to buy them.
This is not just about money of course, but it is always about influence. If you believe in what you are doing, you want to influence people with it. The free model can help you with this. Ironically, in the long run, the money will often come too.
If you are in the music industry, you should be looking right now for what you can give away. That is what I did with my Portraits of Hope CD offer in the fall, and the results were dramatic. I will probably share stats from that sometime soon.
Overall, I enjoyed the week and look forward to seeing new friends again in the future.
