In a band, there are all sorts of rhetorical levels on which you can distinguish yourself.

1. Instrumentation

Well, if you use autotune, electronic percussion, lots of keyboard synthesizers, and are relatively light on the acoustic side of things, you’re pretty squarely in the Disney-ish pop realm. If you use acoustic everything and you don’t use autotune, then you certainly have your niche among those who like vests, cigars, and craft. If your bass is pretty much the loudest thing on the planet, then you’re using a distinct and popular connotation, especially in South London (I guess?).

2. Melody

If you’re country music, your melodies will be usually pretty monotonic, occasionally traveling along a major triad and hitting blue notes (flatted 3, flatted 7 usually). If you’re just good old pop, you’ll probably pretty squarely travel along the major triad. If you want a more Maroon 5 flavor of pop, you might add some scalar action in there. If you’re beer-sloshing Mumford, it’s pentatonic for you.

3. Harmony

Well, this is pretty well documented, but you have all the creative permutations of the vi-IV-V-I that are pretty prevalent and the occasional deviation from Edgar Meyer (ii-iii-V-[vii]) or Hans Zimmer (i-bVII6-VI-#III). You could also do some non-traditional (i.e. not four-chord) patterns, but then people would accuse you of being some sort of Radiohead imitation.

4. Idiom

This may be a bit subtler, but you can do all the above things identically and still be different. It might have to do with the particular textural execution of each of the instruments. Guitarists have a thousand and one ways of picking, and each one has a slightly different connotation. You could be a Paul Baloche kind of pianist or you could do some Hillsong stuff. Same instrument, totally different feel.

The following things aren’t really ways in which different niches within the popular music world distinguish themselves, but they’re actually so prevalent that they in part define exactly what it means to be popular commercial music.

5. Lyrical Structure

Probably verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, tag, chorus, tag, tag. Or maybe you want to shake things up. Food for thought: does this predetermined structure or form have an influence on how the content emerges?

6. Gesticulation

There’s a whole language of body that’s been extensively developed by commercial forces and which many of us assume to be natural. This is probably the most brilliant thing about modern music: you can feel like you’re moved to do things spontaneously that you learned to do slavishly and liturgically from all sorts of cultural sources teaching you when to move and how to do it right.

7. Ambience

What do your live concerts feel like? Dry ice? Strobe lights? Fog? Blood? Crazy paint displays on the stage floor? Dancers? Tuxes?

8. Habit

How do you dress? What’s your hair like? Don’t underestimate how these things are important—in some cases, how you’re dressed is probably more important than the music itself (either meat or nothing). But maybe you just wear plaid, or a vest, or suspenders, and this makes you feel more distinct. Ha, ha.

So the grand question, to finish up:

Is there a single aspect mentioned above in which contemporary Christian music does not imitate exactly what everybody else is doing?

Paul Baloche, Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, and all the rest: if Paul didn’t mean exactly what you do when he said “conforming yourselves to the pattern of the world,” I really don’t think he meant anything.