Heaven Music Celebrates 10 Years, Aims to Share God’s Love Through Music by 2030

Years before Eliseo Tapia founded Christian music company Heaven Music, Spanish-language Christian music stars Marcos Vidal and Marcos Witt sought his expertise. Tapia met both musicians in a small village in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where Tapia was often singing and playing drums in the church where his father served as pastor.

Around 2009, “both asked for my help to join their team and organize concerts — initially in Mexico, and very quickly thereafter, throughout Latin America,” Tapia says.

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He had already worked on two creative projects with Vidal: 2011’s Tu Nombre and 2013’s Sigo Esperándote , which landed the singer his first two Latin Grammy Award nominations. “When Marcos Vidal’s 25th-anniversary commemoration came around,” he says, “I selected the songs, chose the music producer and defined the overall sound [for his 25 Años album], which went on to win the Latin Grammy in 2016” for best Christian album (Spanish language), his first.

That same year, with his expertise of working with both Vidal and Witt, Tapia launched the label Heaven Music. Now, as it marks its 10th anniversary, Heaven Music is not only one of the most prominent labels in Spanish-­language Christian music but also plays a major role in artist development, production, distribution and more.

In 2019, Heaven Music — based in Houston with a strong presence throughout North America, Spain and several Latin American countries — formed a strategic partnership with Witt’s CanZion, then the largest Spanish-language Christian music label.

Their combined roster includes pivotal figures such as Vidal, Marco Barrientos and Alex Campos; established bands Rojo and Un Corazón; and contemporary voices including Sarai Rivera and Kike Pavón. While artists release music through their respective labels, the operational teams are fully integrated and both labels benefit from a variety of services including live entertainment.

The first year of their partnership, Heaven Music and CanZion staged a one-time festival at the Arena Ciudad de México in Mexico City called the Heaven Music Fest, which featured nearly 20 artists from both companies. They haven’t looked back. Now, the combined company promotes the majority of their artists’ live shows.

“When we started [CanZion] 40 years ago, there was very little infrastructure to support a Christian music industry. The little that did exist was highly regionalized and lacked commercial connections,” says Witt, who decided to take advantage of the fact that he was consistently traveling across the American continent. “During those trips, I made a concerted effort to learn everything I could about our musical genre, as well as its singers, songwriters and producers. Little by little, an international network began to take shape, strengthening our musical expression.”

By the time CanZion began working with Heaven Music, the company possessed a substantial catalog of Christian music, along with a solid track record within the industry. “We lacked presence and expertise in the realm of digital distribution,” Witt says, adding that Heaven Music was a pioneer in that space. “We transitioned from being two medium-­size music companies into a single large entity, which has enabled us to continue expanding and investing in new artists, musical projects, tours and concerts — allowing us to better fulfill our vision of sharing the love of God through the production and dissemination of excellent music.”

Tapia didn’t set out to become a music pioneer. His first foray into the music business was putting together a Christian music concert to support Casa Hogar CHIRIA, an organization in Oaxaca dedicated to the care of children in vulnerable situations. That experience, along with working at an audio company where he “gained a perfect understanding of how it all worked,” led Tapia to doing larger shows. By the time he conceived of Heaven Music, he knew enough about the business to include music recording and distribution, publishing, live-event production and audience growth strategies.

Heaven Music’s distribution model features direct agreements with leading digital platforms and functions without intermediaries. In publishing, it has established a direct rights management structure, backed by agreements with key local collecting societies across various territories — a model that Tapia says enables the maximization of international revenue collection and guarantees that creators receive the true value of their work in every market.

The company’s live division handles both booking and concert production for large-scale tours, producing more than 150 concerts across the Americas in the last year alone. Those shows gathered thousands of fans at iconic venues including Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City; Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Movistar Arena in Bogota, Colombia; and James L. Knight Center in Miami.

Concurrently, Heaven Music is investing in a new era for the label through emerging artists such as Dariana, Enoc Parra and Factor de Cambio, who are bringing creative momentum to the genre. The company has also launched a division specializing in music and content for children focused on education, values and family audiences called Heaven Kids.

The digital era has been a game-changer for Spanish-language Christian music, which has a rich history but did not reach prominence until the early 2000s, when it began to appear on the Billboard charts. The effects of the format have been exponential. According to Luminate’s 2025 reports, last year, Christian music in general experienced a significant growth, with an 18.5% increase in on-­demand audio streams compared with 2024.

“The shift to digital was the pivotal change, because Christian music used to operate in a very different way — through a highly informal, even underground, distribution network centered around Christian bookstores,” Tapia says. “Christian music was unavailable in any record stores back when those still existed. The shift to digital — which arrived very slowly within the Christian music sphere — opened tremendous opportunities.”

He adds, “Part of the reason Heaven Music exists is that, as of 2016, a great deal of [Spanish-language Christian] music had not yet been digitized. Several other artists whom we don’t currently have signed, but to whom we provided distribution services at the time, saw their exposure grow by at least twentyfold.”

Tapia also recognizes the role that Grammy and Latin Grammy winner Juan Luis Guerra has played in the genre’s success. In 2004, Guerra released Para Ti , his first full album of Christian music following his conversion in the mid-1990s. “It led people in general to view Christian music as regular music, not pigeonholing it strictly within the religion of Christians, Catholics or Evangelicals, but rather seeing it as something rooted in faith,” Tapia says.

The set debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’ s Top Tropical Albums chart (where it stayed for seven weeks) and peaked at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums . Para Ti also allowed for more Latin artists to release faith-based music, including Ricardo Montaner (2021’s Fe ), Farruko (2024’s CVRBON VRMOR , which debuted at No. 28 on Top Christian Albums ) and Daddy Yankee (2025’s Lamento En Baile , which reached No. 15 on Top Christian Albums).

Looking ahead, Tapia is working with three genre icons — Vidal, Barrientos and Marcos Witt — on an album that will feature a mix of hymns and original songs. The future of Heaven Music also lies in keeping the past alive and helping established artists like Witt connect with a new generation.

“Our strength at this moment lies in creating, in being able to understand the creative process, understand Christian music, understand why it’s made and what people are looking for,” Tapia says.

There is still a long way to go for Christian music to be treated equal to secular music, Tapia believes. “The idea is for Christian music to be able to reach whatever platforms it needs to reach without running into that mindset of, ‘OK, since you don’t feature alcohol, none of the brands are going to get involved,’ ” he says, noting that it is rare for brands to collaborate with the genre. “It’s true that there are different markets where ‘this fits here, but that doesn’t fit there.’ Everyone who consumes Christian music — or almost everyone — drinks coffee.”

The goal, Tapia says, is to become the first Christian music major label by 2030. The “objective is for Christian music to be completely on equal footing, to achieve the same level of listenership as any other genre.”

This story appears in the May 9, 2026, issue of Billboard.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/heaven-music-label-founder-eliseo-tapia-christian-music/)._