from Hymncharts arranger Don Chapman:
When I check out my YouTube stats I’ll just type “hymncharts” to find my channel. A whole bunch of other videos of my arrangements made by other people pop up in the search results, and today I noticed one had… 15 million views 😱
This is from a lady who asked me over 10 years ago if she may use some of my arrangements for her YouTube channel, and I said “sure!”
So I started looking at some of the other videos. One million here, five million there. How on earth have I missed this over the years LOL!!?? Between these other channels and mine, I counted a little over 43 million total views.
I’ve been arranging hymns for over twenty years and never once added it all up, and there it was: 43 MILLION views on my work.
My own Hymncharts channel has nearly 4.9 million views across 75 videos. The most-watched of the bunch is my arrangement of Christ the Lord Is Risen Today at 543,754 views, followed closely by Christ Arose at 457,289. Interesting that two resurrection hymns are sitting right at the top, but if you think about it, that’s the core of our faith!
So what does a number like 43 million actually tell me?
It tells me people still love hymns!
We live in a worship world that’s convinced the only songs worth singing are the hottest ones that dropped last month from the biggest church with the best lighting rig. And yet tens of millions of people went looking for old public domain hymns, from somebody who isn’t famous in the least. Hymns written 100, 150, 200 years ago. No rollout, no influencer, no conference push. People searched for these hymns because they wanted them, and after two centuries they still want them!
Hymns give us something new songs don’t yet possess: shared memory. Their melodies have traveled through generations, and their lyrics give people steady language for resurrection, suffering, hope, repentance, and praise.
Here are a few thoughts I have on those 43 million views:
1. The faces I’ll never see.
Every one of those views has a person attached to it. (Yes, the same person might watch more than once, so it’s not 43 million separate faces. But it’s still a lot of people!) People listen to hymns for nostalgia, but also as a touchstone of their faith and life. Maybe it was their grandmother’s favorite hymn. This one was in our wedding. Maybe this hymn was sung at dad’s funeral. A hymn can hold a whole life inside it. No wonder people keep coming back!
A lot of these viewers might be worship leaders at small churches with no production budget, learning one of my arrangements so their people can sing it that weekend.
Let’s say some of those views are worship leaders who lead the arrangement to a congregation of 100. That single view just became 100 voices on a Sunday morning. Now multiply that across even a fraction of 43 million, and the real number of people who’ve actually SUNG these arrangements is a figure I can’t begin to count.
2. The Easter pattern.
Remember those top two arrangements on my channel? Christ the Lord Is Risen Today and Christ Arose. Easter is when churches reach for the big ones, the hymns everybody knows. Every spring those view counts climb like clockwork. (My Christmas arrangements do the very same thing every December.) When the calendar matters most, people come back to the hymns.
3. The story behind one hit.
Christ Arose has turned out to be one of the genuine hits of my arranging career. It sits in the top 5 arrangements on the entire website.
Here’s how it happened. Years ago I was working at a megachurch, and one day a remarkably talented vocalist showed up in our choir (and she eventually ended up on The X Factor!) It was the “perfect storm” situation: I slaved over the arrangement to make it fit into contemporary worship (Gospel songs like that are often hard to contemporize), she turned out to be the perfect voice for this arrangement and the megachurch had one of the first pro video setups in the country. We debuted it on Easter Sunday back in 2009, and you can watch that very first service here:
[ VIDEO LINK — Christ Arose, first Easter Sunday 2009 ]
I had no idea where that arrangement would eventually go. I just knew it worked in church that morning!
Arranging tip: the nuts and bolts of Christ Arose.
The chords you choose are everything. Arranging for me can be a bit like a puzzle. How can I find unique, contemporary-sounding chord patterns that still fit the melody? I tinkered with Christ Arose quite a bit and finally settled on what you hear.
Next is the feel – give the arrangement a good groove that tastefully fits the hymn. In the case of Christ Arose, the verse builds tension, then the chorus explodes with an arising chord pattern!
I also like to have a “gotcha” moment in my arrangements – a weird chord, a break, something memorable. My “gotcha” for this arrangement is the final chorus “up from the grave He arose” acapella with punches leading back into the groove.
4. Ten years and still climbing.
The 15 million view video that got this whole article going was Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross. I’m baffled by this one. It’s a great hymn, but not one I’d classify as being in the top twenty like Blessed Assurance or Amazing Grace.
Fifteen and a half million views, and here’s what makes that number remarkable: it took a full ten years to get there. Do the math: 15,614,069 views over ten years comes out to about 1.5 million views a year. That averages more than 4,000 views a day over an entire decade, and it’s still climbing!
That’s the thing about a good hymn arrangement. A trendy song often peaks and disappears, forgotten by next year. A good hymn arrangement just keeps going, year after year after year. Evergreen beats trendy!
5. Why Hymncharts worked.
When I sat down to compose most of these arrangements, I was a young, dirt-poor, part-time church musician who had no idea anyone outside my own ministry would ever hear them. I HAD to create them – back then there were simply no contemporary hymn arrangements available. And while the church I worked at was contemporary, people were still clamoring for (or, dare I say, demanding!) the hymns (and they still are today.)
Turns out God had bigger plans for them than I did.
The lesson I’ve learned and I hope upcoming musicians do, too: fill a need and do careful, faithful work, then let the Lord take it from there.
A genuine thank you.
To every vocalist, musician, video creator, worship leader, and church that has carried these arrangements farther than I ever could: thank you! You took music I made in my home studio and carried it to churches around the world.
Bottom Line: The hymns still work, and faithful work has a way of reaching further than you ever planned.
