Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 10

INDIE
INSIDER
By Michael Raine
TWITCH:
It’s Not Just for Gamers
How Musicians Are Using the Live Streaming Platform
to Make Money & Engage Fans
A
re you familiar with Twitch?
I’ll admit I wasn’t until
Karen Allen reached out to
Canadian Musician. I had a
vague idea that it was a live
streaming platform popular
with video gamers. That is pretty much the
beginning and end of what I knew. Then
Allen, a tech start-up consultant who worked
for I.R.S. Records and the RIAA during the
Napster lawsuit days, got in touch about a
new book she wrote on how musicians can
utilize Twitch.
Her email read: “I wrote this not as a
marketer/educator looking for the next book
idea, but because I’ve been working in digi-
tal music for 20 years and have never seen
anything so effective for artists.” That piqued
my interest…
“Look, I don’t need to be writing a book.
I am a consultant and I do fine. I just came
across this and thought artists should know
about it and, through the process of me
putting a channel together, realized how
10 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
completely complicated it was and thought
it would be too much of a wall for artists to
leap over,” Allen, whose book is aptly titled
Twitch for Musicians, later said over the
phone. “But once they figure it out, it’s pretty
easy. But there’s just nothing that tells you
what to do unless you want to watch 100
YouTube videos. So, that’s why I try to make
this easy for people.”
Twitch is a live video streaming platform
with about 15 million daily active users,
about 90 per cent of which are gamers.
It launched in 2011 as a spin-off of the
general-interest streaming platform Justin.
tv. Because it’s so well set up as an online
community hub, gamers flocked to it and
by 2014, it was the fourth-largest source of
peak internet traffic in the U.S. according
to the Wall Street Journal, behind only Net-
flix, Google, and Apple. That year, Amazon
bought it for USD $970 million.
The basics: there’s a live video feed of the
person doing their thing – playing games
or performing music – and alongside the
live video window is a chat window. In the
chat, people talk to each other and to the
streamer and react in real-time to what’s
happening. The streamer can chat back and
respond to requests.
“So, you end up with this really interest-
ing community formed around the content,
whereas with most other social content
platforms, what it really is, is socially-driven
content distribution. It is sort of the opposite
of live streaming. Live streaming is really all
about slowing down and hanging out and
being in a community with other people
who like the same thing and the creator is
sort of directing what’s happening,” says Al-
len. “A really big creative arts community on
Twitch has been evolving over the last three
years … that includes things like cosplay, art,
cooking, coding, but music has emerged as
the biggest of these creative arts segments.”
The musicians on Twitch – which vary
across many genres, with singer-songwriters
generally being the most successful on the