Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

christiandailyjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 166 posts

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#51

Post by netcan »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #3

Hillsong music is simple, catchy, and easy to play. If a teenager can pick up a guitar and lead their friends to sing along with easy lyrics, it'll be a hit. A satirical take on this is How to Write a Worship Song (In 5 Minutes or Less). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhYuA0Cz8ls Translations of Hillsong music into other languages are also popular. 約書亞樂團 Joshuaband translate some songs into Chinese, and it was a hug…

Couple of points on this.. it's interesting how ideological context perculates (and reverse perculate) through a movement.

(A) Catholic (an example, for contrast) music tends to be institutional: choirs, organs... Formal. You don't just play the organ for fun, it's a scheduled, authorized activity. It's not something that spreads or something that exists outside of its preallocated box.

(B) Hillsong's kind of music is also accessible. You don't need much exposure to play or appreciate it. This isn't exotic tribal music, for and by some specific culture of people (think of Jewish kleizmer for example). It's pop, the stuff anyone can listen to or play.

Ie, you can tell from the music that Hillsong is new/modern, youth oriented, and mainstream-oriented and international/multicultural.

You can tell from catholic music that it's tradition and institution oriented. You can tell from Jewish music that it's tribally oriented. All ideological linchpins of those communities.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#52

Post by taborj »

bartread wrote: post #29
explorigin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about culture. If you were influenced by a high-church growing up, you're more likely appreciate hymns. People that converted without a high-church context gravitate toward a more modern style of worship. The downside of so much hillsong influence is that it dominates a culture and drowns out other modern styles. I feel like all hillsong songs sound the same.

Tend to agree. Most Christian music sounds very samey to me and simply doesn't stir my soul . I realise this is a very personal perspective, but I find a lot of "secular" music better for worship: Hendrix, Led Zep, Guns 'N' Roses, Soundgarden, Hybrid, She, Pendulum, and of course plenty of orchestral and ensemble music from earlier eras. This stuff stirs my soul. I'm honestly not trying to be edgy here, and I'm well…

As the Grateful Dead once sang - "Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right."

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#53

Post by organman91 »

socceroos wrote: post #12

As a conservative, I've never really paid any attention to Hillsong stuff. What I did hear of typical pentecostal music struck me as pretty shallow and.....commercial. Admittedly as an ignoramus, I do wonder how they get around tax exemption while they rake this all in. I know you can't brush everyone with the same stroke, but it feels reminiscent of those mega-pastors that fly around in their private jets to shake h…

To explain my username, I'm an organist. I'm not interested in going to a service that's nothing but a rock concert, but we've successfully incorporated some of these songs (Shout to the Lord comes to mind) successfully into a service that also includes standard liturgy, and I definitely enjoy them in that context. I'm not saying the genre isn't full of empty songs, but there are a few with merit in the lyrics.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#54

Post by expathacker »

samontar wrote: post #48
expathacker wrote: post #40

What relevance does this have to Hacker News?

It’s a pretty clever business niche and a way to run tax-free. The end result is a cultural machine that may well have changed the nature of Christian worship. Interesting, no?

Sure I guess.

tl;dr: Christian organization scams tax payers, recent conservative trends on Hacker News somehow makes this interesting?

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#55

Post by lgunsch »

dwd wrote: post #10
pluma wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, tax-free? Surely this is a for-profit business, not a "church".

And their status is not likely to change while one of their flock is the Prime Minister.

Why would they need to change their status just because they have a large revenue from being successful?

Girl Scouts, a non-profit, bring in 700 million from selling their cookies. United Way Worldwide, another non-profit, has a revenue of 3.9 Billion.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#56

Post by wonderwonder »

expathacker wrote: post #40

What relevance does this have to Hacker News?

Just think of the headline being: "How I leveraged music tempo and celebrity endorsements to bootstrap my startup from nothing to $85 million+ per year without paying a penny in tax." Its a business, maybe not one that you or I may engage in but that level of success is at least worth a headline news link.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#57

Post by NateEag »

expathacker wrote: post #40

What relevance does this have to Hacker News?

From the guidelines on what to submit:

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

It seems perfectly possible to me to be curious about worship music, and specifically how Hillsong got to be such a 900 pound gorilla in the field.

Speaking as a Christian who has very mixed feelings about Hillsong, I certainly am.

That said, the article had little substance, in my view. It recounted the church's history but didn't really touch on why they're so influential, which is really what I'm curious about.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#58

Post by samontar »

expathacker wrote: post #54
samontar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a pretty clever business niche and a way to run tax-free. The end result is a cultural machine that may well have changed the nature of Christian worship. Interesting, no?

Sure I guess. tl;dr: Christian organization scams tax payers, recent conservative trends on Hacker News somehow makes this interesting?

Is it really a scam if it’s what taxpayers want?

I don’t think this is interesting because any conservative trend. It’s a cool business hack that allows you to make money without taxes.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#59

Post by phd514 »

barrow-rider wrote: post #31

"You're not making Christianity better, you're just making rock and roll worse" -H. Hill. https://i.redd.it/5iqvu91yz0ly.jpg

Hank Hill had another great set of lines at the end of that episode (S08E02, I believe) where he gets out a box of Bobby's old toys that he's lost interest in. Hank tells him that he doesn't want Jesus to become like one of those once-fashionable toys that quickly loses its appeal. I was quite surprised to find that much theological profundity in an episode of KoTH.

Edit: Also the bit with the rocker's dad about the fifth commandment.

Re: How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry

#60

Post by thrmsforbfast »

netcan wrote: post #45

I went to a few Hillsong events about 10 years ago, when the church was becoming very obvious cultural influence Australia-wide. There is a lot that's very entrepreneurial about this church. They also started Gloria Jean's, a big, international Starbucks competitor. Like the music stuff, this had to do with youth culture and creating social aspects to the movement. In Australia a lot of people called the denomination…

> just because they've been "making things happen".

Actually, my biggest fear about Christianity in the USA today is that it's NOT "making things happen" Or, perhaps more accurately, the things that it's making happen are businesses.

The mainline congregations and Catholics of the 19th and early-mid 20th centuries made serious contributions to:

1. Education. In addition to the obvious middle and high schools, they started colleges and universities. There are literally hundreds of catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc. colleges dotting rural America. There are also many more that have since shaken the affiliation but were originally started as schools for pastors and teachers. These christian educational institutions touched more than just the churches; e.g., Fred Rogers was educated at a college founded by Congregationalists and a seminary founded by Presbyterians.

2. Pastoral training/care. Aside from the above-mentioned colleges and universities, these congregations also started/supported seminaries and -- perhaps more importantly -- insisted on well-trained pastoral leadership that understood the church's teachings.

3. Congregational care. This included everything from helping out a sick congregant, to gardening, to helping keep the church building in working condition.

4. Community care. Everything from running food pantries to setting up and staffing health clinics, and sometimes even entire hospitals.

Many modern christian churches aren't much more than tax-free concert venues with a self-help workshop on the side run by charismatic communications majors. They'll take the parsonage exemption, but don't seriously engage in any of the traditional Christian charity work: education, healthcare, caring for the homeless and elderly, or even teaching the gospel.

Even the congregation's own members seem to have become not much more than leads for related businesses; e.g., the charismatic church a family friend attends runs a (very profitable) counseling center and refers its members there for basically every problem mentioned to a pastor or other staff member. Not a casserole in sight when she threw out her back, though.

Which I suppose is reasonable. After all, running a lead-generating combination concert/lecture venue is already a full-time job.

Post reply on HN