Christian Gates’ fanbase calls itself “the cult”: a name the community around ItsLuxCity gave itself early in his come-up, and it stuck because the devotion is real, fans travel across states and countries to be in the room. Every artist has fans. This is closer to a congregation.
I want to build a community. My supporters and I, we call ourselves like “the cult.”Christian Gates, ANA Podcast
A name that says everything
The word is a joke and a mission statement at the same time. A cult implies devotion, insider language, a shared identity, exactly the kind of relationship Gates set out to build instead of a passive audience. It is the difference between people who stream a song once and people who feel like they were there first, who take it personally when the artist wins.
Built on drive, not luck
Gates has always framed his rise as a matter of will more than fortune, and that mindset rubbed off on the people who found him first. He said it plainly, back when he was still counting his following in the hundreds of thousands.
The difference between those people and me right now is drive.Christian Gates, ANA Podcast
That is the ethos the community adopted: not passive listeners, but people who show up, share, and push. It is why a song like NUMB could travel from a phone clip to a Gold record with no label machine behind it, because the crowd did the work a marketing budget usually does.
Not an audience. A congregation.
Why it is his real asset
A direct, loyal, online-first base is leverage. It is what let Gates stay independent and own his masters, because he never needed a label to reach people. It is what makes his carefully-booked tours viable. And it is the whole thesis behind The Ring by Lux, the platform he built to give other artists that same direct line to their own crowds. The community was never a byproduct of the career. It is the foundation of it. Read the full story in the wiki.