The annual Christian music juggernaut known as Winter Jam doesn’t just roll into Mobile on Friday, Jan. 12: It starts here.

From Mobile, the tour will go on to nearly 40 more dates, extending into late March. Among them is a Feb. 17 stop at the Legacy Arena at the BJCC in Birmingham.

Five key things to know about the tour, which is famous for offering a massive, multi-genre slate of contemporary Christian music and Christian pop at a bargain-basement price:

Who’s coming?

Every year, the Jam Tour presents a mix of veteran acts (including tour founders NewSong), current chart-toppers and promising newcomers. The mix for this year’s stop in Mobile includes Crowder, Lecrae, Cain, Katy Nichole, Seventh Day Slumber and NewSong, with special guest Joseph O’Brien, tour pastor Zane Black and pre-Jam sessions with SEU Worship, John Wesley and Swedish sibling trio LIN D.

How it works

Winter Jam’s business model sets it apart from most major concert tours. The show starts at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 12, at the University of South Alabama Mitchell Center. The ticketing policy for general admission is bone-simple: You don’t buy a ticket in advance, you line up and pay $15 per person (cash or check only, please, checks payable to NewSong Ministries). So, yes, this often means long lines before the gates open, which will happen at 5 p.m. in this case. But there’s the pre-Jam entertainment while you’re waiting, and it also means no convenience fees, facility fees, service fees or just-for-the-heck-of-it fees. Advance membership in “Jam Nation,” which ranges from $39.99 to $149.99, comes with a variety of perks including the chance to enter early and pick out your seat before the GA rush hits.

Bang for the buck

Winter Jam is curated to be extremely family-friendly, while offering a very broad mix of pop, including hard rock and hip-hop. If you have a favorite pop genre, odds are good that you’re going to get a dose of it.

“Well, as per usual, it’s eclectic,” said Crowder, a veteran who’s back on the tour this year. “It’s a really broad spectrum of music and folks from the church side of things. LeCrae is there. I’m from Atlanta, Ga., LeCrae’s from Atlanta, Ga., [but] I’m like the Appalachian mountains exploded on stage and LeCrae is one of the best rappers in the church scene ever. So we got that going down. Katy Nichole. You’re not gonna show up and not enjoy whatever music’s happening at some point. You’re gonna hit whatever your stride is at some point there for sure.”

Time is tight

Another big thing that stands out about Winter Jam is the clock management. Literally: There’s a countdown timer right there on the stage. Individual sets can be short, especially for the newer acts, but even the veterans know they have no time to waste. The result is that you don’t sit through slow builds, long jams, meandering soliloquies and intermissions that seem to drag on forever. Every single act has to launch hard and make every second count.

For a performer such as Crowder, who has released a handful of studio albums (with a new one in the works) and who’s been putting singles on the charts since 2013, it’s tough.

“I love that part of it, actually,” he said. “I don’t know how you get that much music on a stage, on and off the stage, you know, the logistics behind it. It’s pretty incredible. … Speaking of LaCrae, when I got to Atlanta, I got to be around a lot of hip-hop acts and be friends with some hip-hop artists. And man, I’ll tell you what, they can cram about 26 songs into five minutes. So I got to be well acquainted with [the idea that] sometimes less is more of the song and you can get a lot of songs into a little bit of time. So it won’t feel like we blaze through things, but man, we’ve had, a lot of fun on a Winter Jam situation.”

“How do you, get all this stuff, as your catalog builds, how do you allow us to sing some of these things together in a short amount of time? But man, I, I can’t wait. We have a set already that we’re working on that I think is gonna be really fun. I can’t wait to do it. So we’ll see how it goes down.”

It’s about community

“It feels like you’ve got a broad demographic that shows up year after year, you know,” Crowder said of the audience. “It feels very much like, young and old, across the spectrum. Because, I mean, it’s $15. You don’t have a ticket, you just show up, you come in.

“So you get in the door and you get all this stuff and I think that helps, that the demographic is spread out socially as well as age-wise. It feels like family, because you have a lot of families coming as well as youth groups and that stuff. But that’s part of what I love and why I keep doing it and coming back to it because it feels like a great cross-section of people that you want to be in a room with.”

Crowder described the jam experience as “an entire night of being with people that are singing songs together in a room and you know you’re not alone. That’s one of the best things about the Winter Jam thing to me is you look around that room and you’re in an arena and you’re seeing everybody that’s having the same struggles of life, but we’re announcing things that shift our reality to something that’s true. And that part is worth showing up for.”

For full Winter Jam information, including details of Jam Nation memberships, visit jamtour.com.