By Gavin Boyle
After spending years chasing radio singles, Christian artist Josiah Queen finally found success when he quit pursuing the world and focused on authentically honoring God.
“I was writing songs that I thought would work for the radio — what I thought labels wanted,” Queen told Relevant. “And they weren’t really clicking. So finally I said, ‘Forget it. I’m just gonna make something I like.’ That’s where it started.”
“This was always the dream,” he added. “I used to pray that I’d just write worship music for a living. That’s all I ever wanted.”
Queen has been living his dream over the past year, breaking into a wide audience through TikTok and other social media. He now has millions of people who listen to his songs on a monthly basis, and his most popular tune, “The Prodigal,” has over 86 million streams on Spotify.
Even though he released his first album just over a year ago, Queen has already completed a 24-stop headline tour and is joining Brandon Lake and Phil Wickham this summer for their “Summer Worship Nights Tour.”
“One of the venues seats like 30,000 people. I don’t even know what that looks like . But honestly, I’m just trying to learn from guys who’ve done this a lot longer than me. I’m going in with a student mindset,” he said.
“My biggest takeaway from all of this? You’re only as good as the team around you,” Queen added. “God’s been faithful in surrounding me with people who work hard, who believe in the music. I don’t take that for granted.”
Queen is not the only Christian artist who has found success through social media in recent years. Singer Forrest Frank has also reached a secular audience through authentic songs that speak to faith.
“For my song ‘No Longer Bound,’ the radio stations were like, ‘We can’t put this on the radio because the kick hits too hard; you need to change that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, then just don’t put it on the radio.’ I don’t care; I’m just making it the way that I love it,” Frank previously said when discussing why authenticity matters to him. “I think that authenticity is what kids resonate with.”
In the same way that Christian movies and TV shows have seen a revival in recent years, it is amazing that the same thing happening in music as well as God works in a world desperate for His hope.
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