Veteran gospel recording artist Marvin Sapp announced in July his new distribution deal with Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by rapper and businessman Jay-Z. The partnership, Sapp remarked at the time, is a “reminder that—as the scripture says—with God all things are possible.”
Then, last month, prominent gospel artist Hezekiah Walker announced that he too had inked a distribution deal with Roc Nation, which appears to be staking out a new position in the gospel market. Walker, another fixture in the genre, has been recording music since the late 1980s and serves as pastor of the Love Fellowship Tabernacle in New York City. The partnership with Roc Nation, he said on Facebook, presented an “opportunity to put gospel music in the ear of those who wouldn’t normally hear it.”
Roc Nation’s foray coincides with the accelerated growth of Christian music. In 2024, analytics group Luminate reported that the Christian/gospel genre was growing at a rate of 8.9 percent, twice that of the music industry overall. Global streaming for new music fell across the board last year, but new Christian music bucked that trend and saw gains in listenership.
There have been other signs of commercial success. Two Christian artists, Brandon Lake and Forrest Frank, entered the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 2025, and Christian musicians are headlining profitable arena tours. For entertainment companies, entering the Christian and gospel music scene is now a strategic decision.
But these types of industry partnerships can come with their own set of headaches for musicians.
Online, some gospel music fans responded to Sapp’s announcement with skepticism, questioning the wisdom of trying to distribute gospel music via a relationship with a company like Roc Nation. One influencer posted on social media, “There’s absolutely no logical reason why someone who identifies as a bishop”—in reference to Sapp— “should collaborate with someone like Jay-Z.”Others cited objectionable lyrics Jay-Z’s music as evidence that a visible relationship with the rapper was compromising for Christian artists.
The Roc Nation partnerships are a continuation of decades of cooperation between the mainstream music industry and gospel artists. So even though Sapp and Walker’s deals with Roc Nation may not be a departure from the norm, the perception of these arrangements is distinct because of Jay-Z’s public profile, said Charrise Barron, a music professor at Harvard University and the author of the forthcoming book The Platinum Age of Gospel: The Years When Gospel Music Changed Everything.
Christian critics of Jay-Z point to lyrics like “Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church end” (from the 2009 hit “Empire State of Mind”) as evidence that the music mogul shouldn’t be trusted to steward gospel music in the marketplace. Following the release of Jay-Z’s 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail, even long-time admirers of his music lamented his adoption of a “philosophy that views religious authority as a threat to human flourishing.”
“There’s more visibility in this kind of relationship because Jay-Z is the face of Roc Nation,” Barron said. “Jay-Z has been vocal about spirituality, and his beliefs don’t align with those of many gospel listeners.”
The artists partnering with the music mogul, however, see the collaborations differently.
Known internationally for his R&B and jazz-inflected music and his rich baritone voice, Sapp got his start in the gospel industry as a member of the group Commissioned. He released his first album in 1995. Fourteen years later, his 2009 album Here I Am debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, making him the highest-charting gospel artist to date. Sapp has been nominated for 11 Grammy awards and remains a pastor and bishop in the Global United Fellowship church (a charismatic denomination made up of predominantly Black American churches).
Sapp’s first album under the Roc Nation contract, Restoration, will be released on November 20. Restoration will be Sapp’s 17th album, and the first to be produced by his longtime music director Curtis Brown. In the past, Sapp has primarily cowritten his songs. But he solo-wrote almost all of the music for this album—at Disney World. (His creativity flows while he’s people-watching.)
“For this one, God locked me in and told me to deal with the concept of ‘restoration,’” Sapp told CT. “We are living in a time when we aren’t giving grace and mercy to one another, so I wanted to take time to reflect on the grace and mercy of God.”
Sapp says the distribution deal with Roc Nation is giving him autonomy that he didn’t have as an artist with a traditional label deal. Stanley Brown, a producer and CEO of gospel label Timeless Music Group (TMG), brokered the deal between Sapp and Roc Nation. Brown has said that he hopes the collaboration would “establish Roc Nation’s presence in the gospel/Inspirational space with the highest level of credibility, excellence, and cultural impact.” (TMG entered a distribution partnership with Roc Nation in 2023.)
Other contemporary gospel artists have inked similar deals. In the mid-1990s, Kirk Franklin’s label at the time, GospoCentric Records, partnered with mainstream label Interscope Records, which had also signed Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur. Franklin’s success helped usher in what Barron calls the “platinum age” of gospel, which saw multiple projects go RIAA platinum (including Franklin’s 1998 Nu Nation Project).
From the early ’90s to 2013, Barron says, the industry invested a lot of money in the genre and saw unprecedented crossover success with projects like Sapp’s Here I Am and the soundtrack to the 1996 film The Preacher’s Wife, which featured songs by Franklin and the late Richard Smallwood.
“By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, after the Great Recession, labels saw an opportunity to pull back,” Barron said. The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of streaming upended the whole music industry, gospel included. Music consumers are now seeing an upswing after a decade of divestment and industry consolidation.
Despite the fluctuations, gospel music has always had a place in the mainstream music industry, because the genre has been integral in the development of American popular music, said Donté Ford, a music professor and associate chaplain for worship arts at Wheaton College.
Ford noted that, since Black Pentecostal churches embraced early gospel in the 1930s and ’40s, Christians in those communities have long accepted that music formerly considered “worldly” could have a place in the church.
“Gospel music was born out of a marriage between the sacred and secular,” he said. “In its essence, it is blues music with sacred text.”
Most gospel fans aren’t uncomfortable with the genre’s sonic proximity to secular music, or with artists finding mainstream success, Ford said. However, they may object to artists who appear to borrow performance practices from gospel while devaluing the spiritual roots of the music.
“People get upset when it appears that an artist is mocking the tradition, or mocking the church,” he said.
Ford noted while it’s understandable for Christians to be uncomfortable with the idea of their favorite gospel artist collaborating with Jay-Z, some of that discomfort may come from a misunderstanding of what these deals entail, and what they will mean for the music.
“These are distributing relationships, and the gospel music industry is not a church,” he said. “Does this open up the possibility that the partnership will impact the music and its content, perhaps. But we don’t know for sure.”
Unlike traditional label contracts, which historically have given labels substantial creative control over an artist’s output, distribution relationships tend to be relatively hands-off.
“A distributor takes the finished product and takes it to places and spaces where it might not otherwise be heard,” Sapp said. He also pointed out that his distribution deal allows him to retain rights to his master recordings and sign over a much smaller percentage of financial earnings to Roc Nation.
“When I was signed to a label as an artist, the label owned all of my masters,” Sapp said. “Now, it’s more like they are leasing my music for a time, and I get it back after they distribute and promote it.”
Barron and Ford said gospel artists still face barriers to entry in the predominately white contemporary Christian music market, which is well-resourced—and equally enmeshed with the mainstream music industry. Major Christian label Capitol Christian Music Group, the home of Chris Tomlin, Passion, and Kari Jobe, is owned by Universal Music Group, whose other artists include Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Post Malone.
“The question is, what level of relationship and engagement allows an artist to maintain an uncompromised standard of Christian character and conduct?” Ford said. “We can only watch and see what happens to the content of the music and the character of the artist.”
Sapp acknowledged the concerns expressed by some fans about his deal with Roc Nation and suggested they should avoid assuming the worst. “Not everyone has the same assignments and the same gifts. Rather than judging the decisions, why not pray that God keeps us from evil?”
The gospel artist added that, while he doesn’t believe that collaboration with major labels and distributors is morally compromising, he does think the sonic diversity in gospel music has decreased as the genre found crossover success.
“Back when I started in the ’90s … the Clark Sisters didn’t sound like the Pace Sisters. The Winans didn’t sound like Commissioned,” he said. “There’s been a merging in style, and there’s less distinction between CCM and gospel.”
Barron argued that the growing popularity of contemporary worship music over the past two decades has pushed some gospel artists to write and record different music in order to make themselves more appealing to white, middle-class Christian audiences. She connects that effort with a noticeable change in the theological orientation of the music.
“There’s been a move [away] from talking about Jesus as the co-suffering Savior who walks with me,” Barron said. “Jesus has walked with Black folks through the challenges we’ve endured in the United States. That’s part of the story of gospel music.”
This means while the mainstream music industry may reward artists for releasing music that is more spiritual than explicitly Christian, the Christian music industry and audience also exerts its own pressures—on lyrics, tone, and theological focus.
“Now we talk about God: ‘I am a friend of God,’ God is a ‘good, good Father,’ ‘God loves me,’” Barron said. “Contemporary worship music focuses on God as friend rather than Jesus as the co-suffering friend.”
Ford also expressed concern about preserving the essence of gospel music—both the style characteristics and the message—as it continues to influence American music and evolve over time.
Appearances of gospel singers or choirs in popular culture sometimes strip away the genre’s context and history in an attempt to bluntly use its sounds and imagery.
But Sapp, for his part, remains optimistic about the future. He noted that gospel music still carries an amazing ability to reach non-Christian audiences, pointing to a recent collaboration between Kirk Franklin and rapper GloRilla as an example.
“It’s about the Good News,” Sapp said. “Look at that project. That record is doing all kinds of things. I’ve seen trends come and go, but the gospel isn’t going anywhere. God is taking these moments and songs to magnify himself and the gospel and bring people to embrace it.”
