I almost never listen to the radio. At home I don’t have a good enough antenna on the stereo to bring in much, and in the car I almost always have the iPod Classic, or an audio book, or a podcast playing. So I don’t even know what the current FM stations are, or where they are on the dial. Once every few months I’ll scan through the stations to see what’s what. The Kansas City market has at least a couple of “classic rock” stations, for which I’m supposedly in the target demo. They’re OK for a while, but honestly, an hour or two of classic rock, 2-3 times a year, is plenty for me.

Last week I had an occasion to be driving through the metro, and I took a break from the audio book I was listening to and switched to the radio. I scanned for a while and eventually landed on a contemporary Christian music (CCM) station. I listened for a while, and was struck at just how similar many of the songs sounded to one another. Not just similar lyrically, but similar sonically – like they all shared the same pool of session players and producers.

To be fair, the charge of “sameness” has also been a plague of regular Top 40 radio for some time as well, so CCM isn’t alone in its artistic narrowness. And I don’t level the same charge at country music stations, which are by definition focused on one musical genre. But with Christian music being, at its core, an ideological genre, and with the vast diversity of humans that God has created, it seems like such a vast array of humans worshiping an infinite God would – and should – engender a more diverse and interesting array of artistic expression. And yet we have an artistic expression that’s pretty narrow and fairly predictable. In fact, it’s happened on more than one occasion that I’ve scanned the radio dial, landed on a song during an instrumental section of the song, and correctly guessed that it was a Christian station. That strikes me as just kind of sad. And a little creepy.

It seems like the Christian music market is now mostly segmented into either the slick and shiny K-LOVE fare, or the hip-hop and screaming (and I mean literal screaming) fare on RadioU. There is a small segment of singer-songwriter type artists featured at sites like The Rabbit Room, but most of them never see much (if any) airplay.

As I was pondering this during my drive through the metro last week, it made me really miss the days of Cornerstone Festival. Cornerstone was an annual Christian music festival held just outside Bushnell, IL, that featured bands and artists of just about every musical genre, and a few that were genre-bending. It was great place to discover new artists and music that dared to go outside the rigid confines of Christian radio and the major record labels.

Perhaps these kinds of artists are still out there, and I’ve just not encountered the appropriate discovery mechanism(s). If anyone has any such pointers, please leave a comment and let me know. In the meantime, here’s one of the old Cornerstone artists I dialed up on my iPod Classic last week after I could take no more CCM radio: