Popularity
Some Hillsong songs have distinct gospel influences (see Gospel music and Urban contemporary gospel) and this has probably contributed to its acceptance. Hillsong Music titles regularly feature in the top 25 of most songs sung in all reporting countries recorded through CCLI http://www.ccli.com/Index.cfm website.
People Just Like Us was the first ever Christian album to go Gold in Australia as well as the first to go Platinum. To date, all Hillsong live worship albums have achieved Gold status in Australia. In 1996, Hillsong Music reached international prominence with the release of Shout to the Lord produced by Integrity Music. This was Integrity Music's first live worship album featuring a female worship leader - Darlene Zschech.
The 2004 Hillsong live worship album For All You've Done, debuted at #1 on the Australian Record Industry Association album charts. There was some controversy about this outcome as almost all of the albums were sold at Hillsong's annual conference held in early July. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) have defended the outcome noting that the album sold more copies than any other record on sale in Australia that week. As of December 2011, Hillsong has sold more than 12 million records across the globe, following its first release in 1991 and a quarter of all contemporary songs heard in Australian churches in 2011 were written by Hillsong.
Read more about this topic: Hillsong Music Australia
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)