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:
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“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)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)