Worship Music Streaming Hit a Record in Q1 2026 and Four Labels Are Splitting Most of It

Worship music posted its largest first quarter on record in 2026. Luminate's Q1 streaming report, released last week, shows on-demand audio streams in the Christian and Gospel category were up 31 percent year over year. The format pulled 4.7 billion U.S. on-demand streams across January through March, surpassing the previous Q1 record set in 2022 by 11 percent. Four labels accounted for roughly 67 percent of the category's volume.

Bethel Music, based in Redding, California, sits in the top spot. Bethel's first quarter pulled 612 million U.S. on-demand streams, paced by Brandon Lake's Coat of Many Colors and the Kari Jobe single Steady Heart. Lake, who is signed jointly through Bethel and Provident, has been the single largest individual driver of the worship streaming run. His full-length record from October 2025 has sat inside the Christian albums top 10 every week since release. Bethel does not release its label-level revenue but the streaming volume implies a payout in the $4.4 million to $5.2 million range for the quarter on Spotify alone.

Maverick City Music posted 487 million U.S. on-demand streams in Q1. Maverick has continued its strategy of releasing collaborative full-length projects rather than single-artist albums. The Old Church Basement format, which dropped its third volume in February, drove 142 million of those streams. Chandler Moore and Naomi Raine remain the lead voices on the most-streamed cuts. Maverick's distribution deal with Tribl Records has held since 2021 and the label has not signaled any plans to renegotiate or sell.

Elevation Worship, the music ministry of Elevation Church in Charlotte, pulled 421 million U.S. on-demand streams in Q1. Elevation's Q1 was driven by the live album recorded at the church's January conference and by an evergreen catalog including Graves into Gardens. Pastor Steven Furtick continues to feature in the production credits. Elevation's distribution runs through Provident Music, which is part of Sony's Christian arm. The Elevation catalog has shown more durable streaming than any other worship catalog in the modern era and has the lowest year-over-year decay rate in the category.

Hillsong, the Australia-based original anchor of contemporary worship, pulled 287 million U.S. on-demand streams in Q1. Hillsong's volume is down 14 percent year over year, the only one of the four major labels to post a decline. The slide is tied to a multi-year transition out of the Hillsong UNITED brand and the absence of new Hillsong Worship full-length projects in 2025. Hillsong's catalog still holds five of the 50 most-streamed worship songs of all time on Spotify and remains a profitable line for the parent organization.

The platform mix tells a different story than the previous worship cycle. YouTube Music posted the largest year-over-year growth, up 41 percent for the genre in Q1. Spotify grew 28 percent. Apple Music grew 19 percent. Amazon Music grew 22 percent. Paid YouTube Premium subscriptions inside Christian households are a meaningful piece of the YouTube growth, but a larger driver is worship music's strong performance on long-form lyric videos and live recordings, which fit YouTube's auto-play model better than other genres.

Independent and church-led labels are growing faster than the majors on a percentage basis. Tribl, Integrity Music, Provident, and Capitol Christian have all posted growth. Smaller labels including TBN Music and Boyd Bell have also crossed into the top 50 worship label tier for the first time. Andrew Boyd, the founder of Boyd Bell, told Christianity Today in March that the cost of producing a worship single has dropped roughly 60 percent since 2019 because of in-the-room recording technology and improved at-home mastering chains. That has lowered the bar for new labels to compete.

The audience demographics inside the genre are shifting. Spotify's listener data, shared with reporters at the IEBA conference in February, shows the under-25 share of worship streaming rose to 34 percent in Q1, up from 22 percent five years ago. The over-55 share dropped from 31 percent to 19 percent. The shift mirrors broader streaming demographics, but the rate of change inside worship has been faster than in adult contemporary or country.

Live attendance numbers are tracking with the streaming run. Maverick City's spring tour played 28 dates between February and April with 84 percent average paid capacity. Bethel hosted a worship night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on March 28 that sold 47,000 paid tickets. Elevation does not tour as a separate act but Pastor Furtick's church conference circuit has continued to sell out at venues including Spectrum Center in Charlotte. The live and streaming sides of the genre are reinforcing each other in a way they did not five years ago.