Also, it matters little what groups prefer to call themselves. Fans are naturally going to think of groups as this style or that based on how they compare to other groups. It would be disingenuous for a group that sounds similar to other Southern Gospel groups to deny they’re part of that group, because that only confuses fans. If the group really is part of a progressive movement, someone will eventually invent a name that sticks…for example, “newgrass” was invented to distinguish the progressive style of bluegrass from traditional bluegrass.

Simply calling a style Progressive doesn’t work, because today’s progressive is tomorrow’s traditional.

The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to “rebrand” an existing style. A group of industry leaders have already tried to do that very thing with American Gospel Music…trademarking the brand, and supposedly weeding out the riffraff who give SG a bad name due to their incompetence. In the process, they went outside of SG to pick up some quality acts from Inspirational, and of course, that has diluted their brand. If Triumphant Quartet and Babbie Mason are both part of the genre, it’s impossible for fans to hear a common thread in the style. It’s been so meaningless so far that I have yet to see a CD on a shelf with the American Gospel Music brand on the cover.

iTunes itself is horrible. Sometime when in the store, hit Ctl+B to browse, and see the ridiculous categorizations. Maybe they’ve improved over the last couple of years, but they used to have some SG artists under country – and that was one of the better ones.