DEEP DIVE: WHO ARE THE CHH TASTEMAKERS?

In Christian Hip Hop, songs don’t become popular the same way they used to.

The path a record takes to reach people has changed. There isn’t one clear lane anymore—there are multiple. That shift has already reshaped how listeners discover music. But it also raises a different question:

What actually makes a song take off?

Because depending on where you look, the answer can change.

A record might sit at the top of one playlist and barely appear on another. It might feel like the song in one space and completely absent in another. For listeners trying to keep up, that can make it harder to tell what’s really moving—and what just happens to be visible in a given moment.

If different platforms, curators, and communities are surfacing different records at the same time, then popularity isn’t coming from a single source. It’s being shaped across multiple ones.

So the question isn’t just which songs are winning.

It’s who—or even what—actually makes things shake.

The Writers Who Help Tell Us What Matters

The first answer is media.

Not because every song starts there, and not because coverage automatically turns into streams. That would be too clean.

But in CHH, media still plays a role in deciding what gets taken seriously.

Outlets, writers, and platforms help surface music, but more importantly, they help frame it. They give context to releases, highlight certain artists, and create signals around what is worth paying attention to—especially in a space where music is constantly being released.

Rapzilla is probably the clearest example. Its influence isn’t just in the volume of content it publishes, but in the role it plays across the ecosystem—more than 23,000 articles over two decades, along with playlists, submissions, interviews, and artist-facing infrastructure. 

Part of that role is filtering. Rapzilla’s submission series notes that hundreds of songs are reviewed each week, with only a small group selected to be featured. In a crowded release environment, that kind of selection is its own signal.

The business value showing up here is: media coverage creates credibility.

For labels and curators, coverage becomes an early signal—one of the first indicators that a record might be worth pushing further. For artists, it becomes something they can point to—something to share, build around, and use in conversations with fans, curators, and other platforms. For listeners, it helps distinguish what is simply released from what is being highlighted.

At the same time, coverage rarely moves on its own. A write-up may surface a record, but it usually needs other layers—playlists, radio, artist amplification, or fan response—to keep it going.

Media coverage can help a record feel credible, but credibility is only one part of the process. For a song to keep moving, it usually needs repeated exposure somewhere else.

The Curators Who Decide What Gets a Second Look

One of the clearest places that exposure happens is through playlists.

But playlisting is not as simple as finding the “best” song and moving it to the top.

Curators are making judgment calls around fit, quality, timing, audience, platform behavior, and sometimes the expectations attached to an artist’s name. That means a song can be ranked highly in one place, buried in another, and missing completely somewhere else—not because one curator is right and another is wrong, but because they may be solving for different things.

Luc DiMarzio knows that tension well. As a longtime CHH listener, writer, and curator with Rapzilla’s playlist ecosystem, he has spent years thinking about why certain records get placed, held back, or moved into different lanes.

“To go on a big playlist, I’m looking for good mixing and mastering. I’m hoping that you’re talking about something interesting. And I’m hoping that everything looks and sounds the way that a professionally done song should. In this day of just how everything rolls, you’re trying to get clicks. If it looks nice, someone’s going to click it, and if it sounds nice, they’re going to keep going back to it.”

That answer matters because it moves the conversation beyond personal taste. A curator is not only asking whether a song is good. They are asking whether it fits the lane, whether the presentation matches the opportunity, and whether a listener is likely to return after the first click.

Even after quality and fit, curators also deal with expectations around artist size, audience behavior, and platform attention.

That becomes even more complicated when artist recognition enters the picture.

A smaller artist may have the stronger record in a curator’s opinion, while a bigger name brings more audience expectation, more clicks, and more built-in attention. DiMarzio described that tension directly:

“There is some tension with that… If Lecrae dropped something and Alcott dropped something the same day, I’m going to want to put Alcott number one, but everybody’s going to be looking for Lecrae to be number one. Lecrae’s probably going to be the new cover poster for it and everything. You know what I’m saying? You’ve got to have clicks on it.”

That is where playlisting becomes a business decision, not just a taste decision.

For fans, it helps explain why different playlists can feel like they are telling different stories. One curator may be rewarding discovery. Another may be balancing audience demand. Another may be organizing around energy, format, or release timing. The rankings can look inconsistent from the outside, but inside the decision, the curator may be weighing several goals at once.

For artists, it means getting placed is not only about having the strongest song in isolation. The song has to fit the lane, the moment, and the audience the playlist is serving.

But even that does not fully explain how records move now.

Because playlists are still important, but they may not always be the first spark. Sometimes they introduce a record. Sometimes they confirm what is already happening somewhere else.

Increasingly, that “somewhere else” is social.

The Platforms That Start the Motion

Playlists still matter, but they may not always be where momentum begins.

That was one of DiMarzio’s clearest observations. Looking back at how he entered CHH curation, he described a period when playlists were often the first place listeners found new artists:

“I think there was a time, especially in CHH, where playlists led it. I started a playlist in 2014 called CHH Workout Mix, and immediately, in a couple weeks, I had 2,000 followers on there. I had no strategy to this. I legit just wanted to make stuff for while I was working out… But I think there was a moment maybe 10 years ago to five years ago where playlists were probably the first thing causing people to hear artists.”

That matters because playlist placement can have measurable impact. One 2025 Journal of Marketing Research study found that songs added to Spotify playlists saw an average 8.5% lift in global streams, with a 4% carryover effect after being removed.

But DiMarzio sees the starting point shifting.

“I think social media is probably the driving force behind people meeting and hearing artists. TikTok taking off in the last five years has kind of changed that. So I would say playlists happen now because people are hearing these artists on TikTok, and then it’s like working backwards.”

That idea changes the order of the funnel.

A playlist placement may still help a song scale, but the first spark can come from somewhere else: a TikTok clip, a YouTube Short, an Instagram Reel, a reaction video, or a live review. Spotify’s own Fan Study reinforces that point: more than half of new artist discoveries on Spotify happen in programmed playlists, with over a quarter coming from Mixes, Radio, and Autoplay.

For artists and teams, that changes the business question. It is no longer only, “How do we get this song on the right playlist?” It is also, “How can this song generate visible behavior before the playlist happens?”

Because platforms do not just show songs to people – they also show response.

A clip gets reused. A sound gets saved. A comment section fills up. A live chat reacts in real time. A short-form video sends someone to the full song. Those signals may not always show up as formal industry metrics, but they can influence what curators, platforms, and artist teams notice next.

A song can start moving in public before it ever looks “official” on a curated list. And as more CHH artists and creators recognize that, they are not waiting for platforms to surface records on their own.

They are creating their own rooms where discovery happens in real time.

The Artists Turning Discovery Into a Room

Live reviews, Twitch streams, TikTok Lives, Instagram Lives, YouTube reactions, Discord communities, and submission-based shows are becoming spaces where artists and creators listen to new music in front of an audience.

In those spaces, discovery becomes interactive. A song is not only heard. It is reacted to, debated, rated, clipped, and sometimes pushed further.

DiMarzio sees that becoming more normal:

“I’m part of a few podcasts that do that well — the reactions, the reviews live on air. I love how it’s been becoming more of the norm for people… I’m for always promoting and pushing dope music in any way that I can.”

A playlist can place a song in front of listeners. A live review lets people watch taste being formed in real time. The audience sees the reaction. The artist gets feedback. Other listeners decide whether they agree.

Miles Minnick and Tommy Zuko are one of the clearest examples of this shift. Their recurring music-review livestreams across Twitch, YouTube, and IG Live use a public submission funnel, turning artist discovery into a live event rather than a private inbox. In one public example, Lil Ziggy’s track “Dat Sound” caught attention during a livestream review and was later connected to a New Mainstream Tour slot in Houston. That does not mean every live review becomes an opportunity, but it shows how artist-led curation can move beyond content and become a pathway.

This is where the business value shows up: artist-led tastemaking creates validation and opportunity.

For emerging artists, it offers more than a possible listener bump. It can put their music in front of people who already trust the host’s ear. For established artists and creators, it builds community around their own taste. For fans, it creates a shared discovery moment that feels more personal than scrolling a playlist alone.

But validation is not the final step either. A live reaction can create a moment. A co-sign can make people pay attention. A clip can push the song into circulation. But for that attention to last, listeners have to keep returning to it—and communities have to keep carrying it.

The Communities That Keep Songs Alive

Fan communities are where attention either fades or gets reinforced.

A song may not become the song for the entire genre, but it can become the song inside a specific community. That still matters. Those smaller pockets of consensus can create repeat listening, stronger fan attachment, and a clearer sense of where an artist’s real audience lives.

You can see that in spaces like CHH Talk, CHH ’Cord, and r/christianhiphop. CHH Talk gives the genre a visible public conversation layer, describing itself as “the community for Christian Hip Hop / Rap fans since 2019” and drawing an audience of roughly 36,000 followers. CHH ’Cord points to a more semi-private version of that same behavior, with weekly new-release notifications, listening parties, and an active community of more than 900 members. Reddit’s r/christianhiphop is less polished, but it shows another layer of fan behavior: listeners debating artists, sharing records, asking questions, and pointing each other toward more active spaces.

The scale is not mainstream, but that is not the point. The value is concentration. A smaller community that actually talks about a record can reveal more than a larger audience that barely reacts. It shows where interest is active, where listeners are returning, and where an artist may have something deeper than passive reach.

That reinforcement is the value.

So Who Actually Makes Things Shake?

Media can make a record feel credible. Curators can give it placement. Platforms can create motion. Artist-led spaces can provide validation. But communities help decide whether people keep talking about it after the first moment passes.

And if there is one clear takeaway, it is that CHH momentum is not built from one lane anymore. It comes from understanding how those lanes work together.

As DiMarzio put it:

“I feel like as technology expands, there’s just going to be other ways to get your stuff in front of people… I think we’re in the middle of people trying to figure out what the next thing might be.” 

That may be the best way to understand tastemaking in CHH right now. It is not settled. It is being figured out in real time — by writers, curators, artists, platforms, and the communities still deciding what deserves to keep moving.