Is streaming your music to Twitch worth it?
I suppose that depends on how you would try to quantify your success. Perhaps not everyone who streams on Twitch has visions of gathering thousands of paid subscribers or merch-hungry fans with fat wallets.
Maybe not everyone has visions of stimulating more bandcamp sales, or a few more thousand spotify streams per month, for an extra dollar.
Why have I joined Twitch to livestream my music?
It was late 2021, and we’d already endured around 18 months of covid. We’d all become used to recording ourselves to share to Facebook groups, or maybe even playing live via Zoom. In fact, real-world events had been operating again for a while but with the threat of covid still ever-present.
I’d investigated Twitch early in the pandemic but gathered the impression that the music section was mainly just DJ’s doing live mixes etc, and I found very little evidence of guitar-playing singer songwriters. I think that maybe I hadn’t looked hard enough, to be fair.
I had spent quite some time perfecting my set up for Zoom sessions, and many people were telling me that my sound quality was excellent – among the best they’d heard online. So that made me wonder how I could make more of it.
Playing online at Zoom sessions is OK, but if there are 20 players, you’ve got an awful long wait between your own performances.
The idea of having a Twitch channel would help to focus the mind and give me an opportunity to play far longer sets than I would get to play via Zoom.
I’m also a keen tinkerer, and I knew that getting to grips with OBS and thinking of creative ways to enhance the stream, would be something I’d enjoy.
So in October 2021 I joined up and started streaming on Twitch.
And in this blog I intend to capture my journey and experiences, to share with anyone else who might be interested.
I’ll blog about technical aspects, social aspects, financial aspects – anything that people are interested in.
Interested? Let me know in the comments what aspect interests you most!
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