The survey hears what worship leaders say.
The store sees what they do.

From four boxes to a platform

What Worship Leader Research found

WLR's work is the most serious public research on the worship-music industry — and its Phase 1 corpus was built in part on PraiseCharts ranking data. Everything below extends their method with the dataset only a practitioner marketplace can hold: timestamped purchase behavior at scale.

Sources: Worship Leader Research — the megachurch-concentration studies, the 2022 Worship Leader Survey Report, and the 2025 Worship Leader Survey Report (incl. “Introducing Will/ow” and the mental-health analysis). Their summary line frames everything below: worship leaders are “well-resourced on the platform and under-resourced behind it.”

When churches actually prepare

The Saturday Signal

Every purchase from the trailing twelve months, plotted by hour and day — the darker the cell, the busier the hour. Midweek afternoons dominate — but look at the two ringed cells: Saturday's peak hour is 8 PM, the only evening peak of the week, and Sunday's peak hour is 8 AM — charts bought the morning of the service.

Clock note: hours are plotted on the store’s clock (fixed UTC-5, ≈ US Central) — one clock for all customers, who span time zones. Individual cells are therefore approximate by each buyer’s offset; the shape of the story is not. Every North American mapping keeps Saturday’s peak in the evening and Sunday’s in the morning, and day-of-week patterns are unaffected entirely.

WLR's #2 burden is “high workload and limited resources” (46.2%). This is what that looks like in a transaction log.

The desperation gradient

The simpler the chart, the later it’s bought

Weekend share of purchases by product format. The gradient is perfectly monotonic: the volunteer with a capo shops on Saturday; the production room shops on Monday.

Sixty percent of leaders have no formal training (WLR 2025) — and their volunteer teams reach for the simplest formats, latest, closest to the service. Simplicity is a proxy for the least-supported people in worship ministry.

Two clocks, two calendars

The choir buys Christmas in October

The median church

The firehose meets a sipping straw

The industry releases 40–50 new songs a year from the Big 4 alone. Nearly half of customers buy exactly one item a year; the median customer buys no more than five. Share of customers by items purchased:

Meanwhile 13% of customers carry 65% of volume — the program churches with choirs, orchestras, and multi-service teams. Breadth and concentration, at once: 17,130 distinct arrangements sold this year, yet 348 arrangements carry half the cash.

Song lifespans

The long memory of the practitioner market

The churn narrative says worship songs die young. The streaming lifecycle may — but the buy-to-play market remembers. Share of this year's cash by age of the arrangement:

The songs themselves

What churches actually sang this year

The year’s top songs by revenue, split the way the church calendar actually splits: year-round and Christmas (classified by theme tags and purchase timing — a “Christmas song” is one churches buy in the fall). Two names to watch across all four lists: “I Know A Name” and “Christus Victor (Amen)” chart in both worlds — the bridge repertoire in song form.

Other threads worth pulling: the #2 choral seller is “My Tribute” — Andraé Crouch, 1971 — the gospel lineage running straight through the modern choral economy. “America The Beautiful” at #5 choral says civic services are still choir services. And in worship, the Christmas list is led not by carols but by contemporary songs wearing Christmas arrangements — “The Joy,” “Holy Forever (Christmas),” “O Holy Night / Holy Forever” — the industry’s newest songs migrating into its oldest season. Ranked by revenue within each list; reach = share of this year’s buying churches; same-title duplicate versions folded.

Two worlds, one platform

The popularity charts are the peak. This is the mountain.

Worship and Choral are structurally different creative economies sharing one platform. The worship leaderboard is all artists and brands. The choral leaderboard is craftsmen and institutions — arrangers, orchestrators, choirs, churches, publishers. The #1 and #2 “artists” in the whole company are people no streaming chart has ever listed.

★ Full disclosure: the top of the choral world is PraiseCharts' own creative house — Travis Cottrell, Mason Brown, and Brooke Voland lead our in-house choral team, the flagship of our Choral Primary program. That the in-house team competes with — and often out-earns — the industry's biggest names is itself a finding about where craft value lives. Beyond the house: Lifeway, Word, the Brooklyn Tabernacle lineage (Cymbala, Goss), Prestonwood, and a generation of arrangers — Duren, Knight, Walker, Allen, Smith — carry the wider choral economy.

And the two worlds monetize differently. Depth of relationship — revenue per church reached, indexed to the deepest (Travis Cottrell = 100):

And catalog size isn’t destiny. Divide each worship artist’s revenue by the number of arrangements they have available and the market’s quiet verdict appears — yield per title, indexed to the highest:

Abbie Gamboa has 29 arrangements available; Hillsong Worship has 1,044. Per title, her catalog out-earns theirs ten to one. The pattern holds down the list: the young, focused voices — Gamboa, ELEVATION RHYTHM, Charity Gayle, CityAlight — yield 6–10× the legacy libraries. Demand rewards focus, not accumulation; the market is voting for curation, and it is not voting for back-catalog breadth.

The proportion question

How big are the Big Four, really?

WLR’s Phase 1 showed the popularity charts — CCLI’s Top 25, the streaming lists — belong to a handful of megachurches. So we measured the buy-to-play market: what churches actually purchase to put on the music stand. Counting generously — Elevation, Bethel, Passion, and Hillsong plus every credited leader in their orbits, 23 names in all — the Big-4 families hold:

Why the diversity matters: churches draw from the Getty hymn stream, gospel lineages, indie collectives, denominational publishers, and their own regions' songwriters — 90 different worship artists each reached more than 1% of every church that bought this year. A repertoire fed from many springs is more theologically complete, more resilient to any one brand’s controversies, and closer to WLR’s own finding that leaders discover songs through people they trust, not charts. The pipeline is narrower than the pew.

Performers · Writers · Publishers

Three rooms, one industry — the stage is plural, the page is plural, the paperwork is not

Three rooms run this industry: the performers churches see, the writers CCLI pays, and the publishers who shepherd both. Measured with the same generous method in each room, the first two tell the same story. Among the top-25 performing credits, Big-4-affiliated names hold about 36% of revenue. Among the top-25 writing credits, Big-4-ecosystem pens hold about 36% — the same share. Only the publishing room concentrates: two houses administer roughly half of the top-30 houses’ revenue, five administer 71%.

Audit note, worn proudly: an earlier draft of this section reported the pens at ~58% — computed from a legacy credit table that covered only a quarter of revenue and skewed old. We caught it, retraced every credit through PraiseCharts copyright records (99% of the year’s revenue), and the true number is above. The pens are as plural as the voices; the correction is part of the finding.

The collaboration web

Not an empire. Provinces.

Every credited name on the same arrangements, joined and weighted by actual purchases — 270 names, 496 edges. The Big 4 are central, but the map resolves into natural clusters with distinct identities: the Elevation continent, the Getty constellation, the choral kingdom, the Brooklyn Tabernacle lineage — and young islands like SEU Worship building entirely outside the mainland's gravity. Thirty-five artists live in both worlds — the bridge population.

Drag, zoom, hover. Toggle Worship / Choral / Bridges — or Writers, which overlays the songwriters (✎) behind each catalog: the Elevation writers’ room orbiting its brand, the Maverick City collective writing as a cloud, Ed Cash and Jason Ingram threading through everyone, the Getty–Townend axis. Writer links come through PraiseCharts copyright records — 99% of the year’s revenue carries digitized writer credits. Size nodes by collaboration index or reach. Open full screen →

The locked door

One in ten thousand.

Fewer than one in every ten thousand music libraries on PraiseCharts is shared with a second person. Everything else flows to the team through one leader's hands — email, text, AirDrop, printer — every week, for every song.

Method note: personal libraries are created per-account by default, so the denominator includes every individual account. The numerator is the story: organizational sharing effectively does not exist in today's product and licensing model.

What leaders need

More David

WLR found the cost: purpose without joy (78.6% vs 44.3%), an 8.5× mental-health gap, and 87% of leaders carrying it alone. The data above shows the same people buying charts at 8 AM Sunday.

— and the catalog can help. A theologically tagged library can surface lament, confession, and honest question as easily as celebration. The happy-clappy problem is partly a findability problem.

The vision

Authentic Worship Intelligence

Everything above measures what churches do. This last section is what PraiseCharts intends to do about it — because the findings converge on a single diagnosis. The Saturday Signal is a leader out of time. The desperation gradient is a leader out of options. The long memory of the market is a church that wants its whole songbook, not just this year’s. The locked door is one person carrying it alone. And the happy-clappy problem is, in large part, a findability problem. The industry got very good at supplying worship music. The harder job — the one nobody has fully done — is helping a worship leader find what the moment actually calls for.

The near horizon is already in motion, on three fronts — each with its own job, all pushing the same direction: richer content around every worship song and resource, deeper and wider song discovery, and less of the overwhelm that drives a leader back to the same twenty songs.

The aim beneath all three is the same, and it is worth saying plainly: to help worship leaders become significantly unique — not parrots of the industry. The data above shows churches already practice more diversity than the popularity rankings suggest; the products should make that instinct easier to follow, not harder.

And the deeper build underneath is called Authentic Worship Intelligence: one table where everything that belongs together is finally visible together. Modern worship songs beside ancient hymns. Ancient liturgies beside modern ones. Theological texts from the church fathers to this decade. All of it joined by a rich tagging system — themes, theological concepts, scripture connections shown with their evidence, liturgical season, the direction a song is sung in, the moment of the service it serves — so that a leader planning around Romans 8, or a sermon on lament, or a communion liturgy can start anywhere and see everything relevant laid out in front of them.

This is not a concept slide. The foundation exists: an analyzer that reads every song’s full lyric and emits its themes, its scripture connections with the lyric and the passage side by side as evidence, and the practitioner classifications worship pastors actually plan with — and it was independently reviewed against songs it had never seen before we trusted it. The graph runs in both directions: start from a passage and find the songs; start from a song and find the passages; start from a service moment and find what belongs in it. Hymns, liturgies, and the church’s older texts join the same graph next — the structure was built content-agnostic from the first table.

And this is our answer on AI, plainly: the industry’s response so far is a label on the finished product. Ours is to point the machine at the reading, so the human can do the choosing. AI reads a million pages so a worship leader can see the whole table — and worship stays human in the room. A table that holds Charles Wesley next to this year’s releases, and lament next to celebration, is also how the catalog answers Finding 12: more David, made findable.

How to read all of this

All figures are aggregates from PraiseCharts transaction data (trailing 12 months to July 2026 unless noted; seasonal views 36 months). No customer is identified; cells describing fewer than 10 churches are suppressed. Artist figures are “artist-credit dollars” — multi-credited works count once per credited name, by design. Identity consolidation via PraiseCharts artist profiles. Timestamps are stored at UTC-5 (≈ US Central); day-level patterns are robust, hour-level within ±1 hour. Worship/Choral is designated at the arrangement level. Big-4 affiliation for the performing comparison counts each brand plus its named leaders as credited (23 names) — generous by design. Publisher figures reflect administered catalog as credited in PraiseCharts copyright records; the top-30-house pool is the denominator for the publishing concentration shares. Songwriter figures flow through PraiseCharts copyright records (99.4% of the year's revenue carries digitized writer credits); the Big-4 pens share uses the same generous ecosystem method as the performing comparison — each brand plus its named leaders and historic writer circles (Elevation: Furtick, C. Brown · Bethel: B. & J. Johnson · Hillsong: Fielding, Ligertwood · Passion/sixsteps: Tomlin, Redman). An earlier legacy credit table (24.6% coverage) briefly produced a ~58% figure; it is retracted and documented, and the corrected figure is shown. Dollar figures appear only as unit prices or indexed values, and customer counts only as percentages of the year's buying base ("reach") or as ratios, by deliberate choice — this document describes patterns of behavior, not company financials.

Disclosure, plainly: PraiseCharts is a marketplace — breadth is good for our business. That's exactly why this document shows data rather than asserting conclusions. Where behavior confirms WLR's survey findings, we say so; where it complicates them, we show our work. Corrections welcome: this is a contribution to the research conversation, not the last word.