Tuesday, April 22, 2008
By David Bauder
Charlie Humbard and Brad Siegel started the channel.
NEW YORK — Only a few thousand families in Tennessee were able to see the Gospel Music Channel light when it began less than four years ago.
Now it’s television’s fastest-growing cable network — available in some 40 million homes, more than a third of the nation.
It reaches a milestone Wednesday when it carries live coverage of the annual Dove Awards for gospel music.
The co-founder of the Gospel Music Channel attributes its success in part to a lesson learned from his father, the late televangelist Rex Humbard.
Humbard embraced inspirational music of all forms — June Carter and Johnny Cash, Mahalia Jackson, Andrae Crouch and Amy Grant all performed on his show, said Charley Humbard, co-founder and president of the Gospel Music Channel.
Similarly, the Gospel Music Channel plays the gospel sounds of black churches, edgy Christian rock and rap, mainstream contemporary Christian pop and even Latin gospel music, he said.
Radio station owners typically recoil from presenting so many forms of music, and some in the industry believed the Gospel Music Channel was making a mistake.
Instead, the network has been accepted by fans of all forms of inspirational music, Humbard said.
“We like to say in here, ‘multiple styles, one message,’” he said.
Charlie Humbard is a former executive at Discovery, where he worked on networks passionately devoted to particular interests such as health and aviation. He joined with a former Turner executive, Brad Siegel, to begin the Gospel Music Channel.
Past attempts to reach this market like BET Gospel did not succeed because of a limited focus, they believed, leaving a large community of inspirational music lovers with no home.
Within six months of raising money for the network, they were on the air. That was the easy part.
“You have to have a totally unique programming concept and be able to prove the demand of an audience in order to be able to get in the door and talk to cable operators,” said Siegel. “Cable operators will tell you that they don’t want to watch any more networks.”
Cable systems have limited space to add new networks and are much more interested now in high-definition or on-demand channels, said Jack Myers, editor and publisher of the industry news source jackmyers.com.
As an independent company, the Gospel Music Channel doesn’t have the muscle of big media conglomerates that often force systems to accept a new channel as part of a larger deal.
What it has to offer are true believers. A study of more than 100 emerging networks ranked Gospel Music Channel No. 1 in the connection its viewers feel toward the channel, Myers said.
“Once they get a viewer, they keep them,” he said.
It may be the last of a dying breed. Siegel doubts that other new independent cable channels will be able to establish themselves in the future; the Internet is a more viable option for new ideas.