Tony Williams, AKA Addison Groove, first saw a DJ livestreaming just before the pandemic hit. Nina Kraviz was playing a set in her kitchen and streaming it on YouTube. He immediately knew he wanted to give it a try. After ordering a £10 cable that would allow him to stream video from his phone, he performed his first livestream on Instagram in March 2020. He wasn't sure if anyone would tune in, but then lockdown began and music fans missing the clubs flocked to his channel.

Williams streamed every day for 17 days when he started, attracting up to 400 viewers per hour. "I'd be on Instagram drinking mezcal and eating cheese and Paul Woolford would be in there, talking to Fracture,” he recalls. "I managed to get all these people talking and having a laugh while I played my record collection of anything from cumbia to acid techno—I saw the beginnings of the community."

Williams named this community "The Barrel Room" after the empty barrel his decks sat on, which had once contained mezcal brewed with his friend Rob Ellis, AKA Pinch. His listeners came back every night, and soon started asking how they could donate money to keep the stream going. Making a profit hadn't been his intention, but with a tour in India and Australia cancelled by the pandemic, Williams decided to search for a platform that would allow him to easily monetise his stream.

This is how he found Twitch, which was an improvement on Instagram Live in almost every way. Twitch offered more flexibility and higher quality in audio and video streaming, alongside a suite of specific features for monetisation and fostering community. He encouraged his followers to make Twitch accounts and moved The Barrel Room to a new platform.

The Barrel Room became a family. After sharing his address with subscribers, Williams started to receive gifts in the mail, ranging from cheese and wine to banana suits and wigs that he'd wear during the stream. "When I was sent stuff in the post, it would sometimes come with a note where people would say I'd saved them with my stream," he said. "And I was reading it and thinking—you've saved me too, in a mental health sense. I'm not sure I could have made it through the lockdown just making tunes on my own."

Addison Groove in The Barrel Room

When the pandemic cancelled gigs and festivals for the remainder of 2020, countless DJs and musicians attempted to replace it with livestreaming, both as a musical outlet to connect with fans and a potential alternative revenue source. There are a variety of services on offer, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Mixcloud Live, which is fully licensed and specifically for DJs.

Twitch started life as a spin-off of streaming platform Justin.tv, rebranding as Twitch in 2011 before being bought by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars in 2014. The pandemic offered a boost to the site's already impressive statistics—almost two billion hours of Twitch have been watched in January 2021, nearly double the figure for the same month in 2020, according to TwitchTracker.

While traditionally associated with video game streamers, Twitch started investing heavily in its music arm in 2018 with striking results. 24 million hours of music were watched in January 2021, up from 4.6 million in the same month last year, according to a report by StreamElements. While DJs have occasionally livestreamed on the platform since 2014, in the past few years more musicians have been establishing a presence, including hip-hop producer Kenny Beats, Grimes, Arca, Baauer and Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda, who has created three albums on Twitch, including one incorporating vocals submitted by viewers. A glance at Twitch's music page today reveals a mixture of DJs playing deep house in their bedrooms, singer-songwriters taking requests on their guitars or keyboards, and amateur metal bands headbanging in their garages. Each performs to an online audience ranging from single figures to the tens of thousands.

Yet despite electronic music being the most popular genre on Twitch, the majority is commercial EDM and dubstep. Few underground DJs and artists have embraced the platform so far. What are the barriers to success on Twitch? And as the pandemic stretches into its second year, with clubs unlikely to reopen until (at least) summer, could the platform offer an alternative way for artists to make a living?

Chris Reed, AKA Plastician, had been hosting a radio show on Rinse FM every week for 14 years when he decided to stop in 2017. He flirted with Twitch in 2018, then dedicated himself to it from March 2020, streaming three times a week ever since. The first thing he loved about the platform was its looseness. A Twitch livestream is not archived by default, so it has the quality of live radio—you can mess around and make mistakes without worrying about people watching a recording in the future. Because of his background in radio, Reed was comfortable chatting with his audience, answering questions in the chatroom, running quizzes and tutorials for music production and business.

Reed also felt freer in his DJing. "When you do a gig for a promoter or a venue," he says, "you know you need to play a deeper set for some clubs or bangers for Friday night at a festival. But Twitch is the ultimate freedom: I could play really weird music or the cheesiest '80s pop. People just come to see you and hang out. You might play an ambient record and have a chat about why you like it. You can't do that at fabric at peak time on a Saturday night."

A quiz on Plastician's Twitch channel

Guy and Howard Lawrence, AKA Disclosure, don't DJ on Twitch, but they have been running production tutorials and competitions since the beginning of lockdown to a large audience. These events demand careful organisation—they release the stems to channel subscribers who must produce a remix over the weekend and submit it on Sunday night. On Monday the Disclosure community votes on their favourite tracks, and then Howard and Guy listen live and discuss the most popular, offering high-end audio equipment as prizes for the winners.

The brothers are pleased to let fans into their production process. "I would have given my left arm to see our influences like James Blake or Burial making beats live in the studio when we were starting out," says Guy. They also say Twitch allows them to connect with their audience more meaningfully than other platforms. "We have [more than] 30,000 followers on Twitch," he continues, "which is easily our lowest number on any platform, but our engagement rate is the highest. If you stream on Instagram, the viewer count starts dropping immediately, but on Twitch people come and stay for eight hours. It's probably the most connected we've felt to our fans ever."

Anjunabeats, the label launched in 2000 by Above & Beyond's Jonathan "Jono" Grant and Paavo Siljamäki, was attracted to Twitch for its young and engaged user base. The outlet has been streaming since 2018. Andrew Boon, head of label marketing, highlights specific community-building features such as custom emotes specific to each channel and the practice of "raiding," when a user goes offline and diverts their audience to another channel, potentially giving a smaller streamer thousands of extra viewers in an instant. Twitch prioritises the quality, rather than quantity, of fans, helping artists and labels identify superfans who do a lot of the heavy lifting in promoting their music. Reed says that one of the regular viewers of the Plastician stream spent more than £250 offering new visitors a subscription to the channel, simply to help the community grow.

Beyond building an audience, streamers can also make serious money on Twitch. Karen Allen, author of the book Twitch For Musicians, describes this as "an advanced, digital version of busking. It's a whole new economics of how to make money as an artist."

Streamers make money in three ways: monthly subscriptions, which generally cost $5 (Twitch's cut is 50 percent); one-off donations of Bits, Twitch's native currency; and donations off the platform, via PayPal or other services. As streamers get more popular they can become Twitch affiliates or partners, ranks that determine how effectively you can monetise your stream. Plastician says he earns around £300 to 450 per month. Addison Groove takes around £600 to 900, "enough to put food on the table and pay my rent." Disclosure receive around £2000 a month in subscriptions, which they reinvest into better streaming equipment and prizes for production competitions. Twitch told Resident Advisor that the number of musicians on track to make more than $25,000 rose 735 percent between January and September 2020, though they didn't specify exact figures.

Guy Lawrence of Disclosure

For Dee Jay Alicia, a Chicago native who has been DJing since 1996, the pandemic came at exactly the moment when it felt that she was finally breaking through, moving from local gigs to international bookings. "I felt like the wind was taken out of my sails because I had finally reached a pinnacle," she says, "this past summer was supposed to be my time to start travelling globally." Twitch offered her an unexpected source of community and financial support. Though her fanbase is modest, averaging around 150 viewers at a time, she is still able to make a decent income. "I actually make almost as much money from Twitch today as I did dressing up and going to play parties three times a week in Chicago," she says.

"It has helped, especially through this year of pandemic, racism and Trump, which has been a lot, particularly as a woman of colour. It was emotionally draining, and for a while I didn’t have my stress relief, which is music. Twitch gave that back." While the gamer community can be known for intolerance towards racial and gender diversity, and the majority of Twitch streamers appear to be white men, Alicia believes this is more related to the algorithm than a lack of diverse streamers. "Because I watch a lot of people of colour, that's what Twitch shows me," she says. "They might show something different to someone who watches mostly caucasian DJs."

So what does a streamer need to succeed on Twitch? The most important quality is consistency. Addison Groove and Plastician stream three times a week. "If you're looking to grow you need to do three-to-five days a week, two-to-four hours per session," says Allen. "Nothing is happening on your channel unless you're there. It's not like Instagram or Facebook and there's a newsfeed where you can leave breadcrumbs for people to be satisfied while you're off doing something else."

The second key is to actively engage audiences. Livestreaming gives musicians the opportunity to break down the hierarchy that a stage creates between artists and fans, letting themselves be seen as regular people, warts and all. "People who are comfortable opening up their process and talking to the audience will get the most out of Twitch," says Reed. "Musicians need to realise that the modern-day fan expects a little bit of access into their world." This may seem counter to the electronic music tradition of the mysterious producer, but showing a human side is how artists build audiences fastest today. This intimacy is felt on the musician's side, too—almost all the artists I spoke to mentioned that they feel more closely connected with their fans on Twitch than they do when DJing at a club or festival.

Dee Jay Alicia's Twitch channel

Beyond individual artist streams, Twitch also provides a flexible platform for bigger operations such as virtual festivals. Addison Groove held BarrelFest, which DJ Mag nominated for virtual festival of the year. Beatport streams events and virtual festivals—including a New Year's Eve event across multiple time-zones—to more than 20,000 concurrent live viewers, and has raised over $500,000 for charitable causes. One of the promoters to expand most assertively into Twitch is Detroit's Movement Festival, which holds regular broadcasts with up to 30,000 live listeners. In 2020, the team paid more than 100 local musicians to perform.

On a recent stream, Plastician dropped Skream's famous remix of La Roux's "In For The Kill." He looked at the camera cheekily and said, "There's no way this one is getting past DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] tonight, so if you're locked in, congrats. You might be the only one who gets to hear this mix." He was referring to a complicated issue around music licensing on Twitch—the one major hurdle the platform has yet to leap. While games companies are happy for streamers to use footage of their games for the sake of exposure, music labels have not been so accommodating. In June and October 2020, Twitch streamers were hit by a wave of takedown notices that claimed their previous streams included copyrighted music they didn't have permission to play. Twitch was roundly criticised for its awkward and unfair implementation of these policies, and apologised in a long blog post. It then launched a feature called Soundtrack, intended to provide a library of music that streamers can use freely in the background of their streams, but this has also caused controversy in the music industry, with several major labels claiming that Twitch didn't reach appropriate agreements with license holders.

Twitch is currently operating in a legal grey area when it comes to using copyrighted music, and it will need to find a solution or risk more serious lawsuits in the future. The platform's position when it comes to DJing is particularly confusing. Twitch's community guidelines expressly forbid sets using copyrighted music that DJs don't have permission to use (i.e. almost all DJ sets), yet Twitch also openly funds channels like Movement Festival's, which stream DJ sets. When RA asked Twitch to clear up this confusion, the head of music Tracy Chan skirted the question. "We ask all creators and our partners to be respectful of copyright and only use content they have permission to use, including in DJ sets."

If you play copyrighted music on Instagram or Facebook Live, your stream is liable to be taken down immediately. But Twitch doesn't currently implement live takedowns, and so DJs on the platform are largely only affected by DMCA takedowns on VODs (videos on demand), meaning videos that are archived and available to view on their homepages. A DJ set that is streamed live and then disappears is still safe for now, but this could change if Twitch decides to implement live takedowns—the technology already exists to do so.

The question of how Twitch should settle its broader conflict with the music industry remains. "When the DMCA takedowns appeared on Twitch, all the game streamers were up in arms," says Reed. "That's because they're used to music having zero value in society. They pay their £10 a month for Spotify and think that gives them the right to do what they want with their music. As someone who is a rights-holder to over 400 tracks on my label, I understand it from both sides. I don't mind people playing my music on Twitch, and I've had the DMCA lifted from my label's catalogue for that reason. But I can also understand why musicians would be looking at Twitch, controlled by Amazon, and think—these streamers are earning, at the top, tens of thousands of dollars a month from their streams. I can understand why labels say they don't want their music played on that stream until they know they're getting paid for it."

Reaching an agreement is likely to entail a painful negotiation with the major labels. Allen suggests that Twitch needs "a blanket license that compensates artists fairly for the music that's being played and takes money from each channel fairly." This isn't prohibitively complicated. The algorithms exist to analyse when copyrighted music is being played, and Twitch can work out precisely how much each channel earns. "I don't see why there can't be a system to keep track of that and to attribute money back to the record labels," says Allen. "All the tools are already there." Whatever the solution is, it seems likely that Twitch will come to an agreement with the music industry down the line. It's a streaming juggernaut with deep pockets, investing heavily in growing its music community.

Representatives for Movement and Beatport mentioned how the process of organising festivals for livestream was in many ways easier than real-world parties—an artist can be booked and a show organised and promoted in a matter of weeks rather than months. Furthermore, these events can provide audiences with experiences they could never get in physical venues. They may miss the throb of bass in their chest and the feel of a crowd, but there is spectacular potential for imaginative visual worlds and interactive performances in virtual livestreams.

All the artists interviewed for this piece said they're likely to continue streaming on Twitch in some capacity even after the pandemic is over and clubs reopen. "When we get back to events we'll bring back even bigger productions for the stream,” says Beatport's vice president of creative services, Ed Hill. "It isn't going to slow down. There's a massive music community on Twitch which is still in its infancy. This is only going to accelerate."