Connecting with musicians has never been easier
All of my life, I’ve been connecting with people through music. From being in a band, travelling thousands of miles and through hundreds of venues, each time there was a moment to connect, to make someone happy, improve their moods, trigger a memory of a moment, make them dance.
Live music connects the musicians to the audience, as well as each member of the audience with each other, even if they’re all strangers.
Through the years, I’ve noticed that as life got more hectic, people sought out live music less and less. I suppose that the effort to go somewhere to watch a band, the cost and potential of fighting for parking and the risk of not really enjoying the bands that were playing could dissuade them from going out. Instead, they would be more likely to hang around at home, watch television and rest after their overwhelmingly busy days. I saw that venues started to close for lack of an audience, and even the more successful bands found it difficult to justify the effort to perform.
If you imagine the big moments in human life, people mark important occasions with two universal things: food and music. Weddings, graduations, or even funerals. We surround ourselves with the cultural traditions that are meaningful to us. Yet food is not a solely human thing.
Music makes us human.
And in the midst of others, music generates power and emotion regardless of the language sung or history shared. Music is shorthand for a shared moment without barriers. Today, this moment, we share this experience.
But these days we typically experience music isolated from others. We hear it in our earbuds, our headphones, streamed digitally from the artist who canned it for our consumption. It’s controlled and contained. Not immediate, intimate, or spontaneous. With the pandemic, venues are shuttered and we’re more isolated than ever.
Being a musician is difficult work: you need to be good at your craft, but also purchase the equipment, practice your set, and travel to the venues, often to find sometimes the only people in the audience are the other bands performing that night and their immediate friends and family.
And now with the pandemic, venues are suffering. Bands are struggling. But people still want that connection. It’s vital to the human experience.
I’ve been pondering this problem for a while. But with technology, there are new ways to experience music that we’re only starting to discover.
I’ve watched bands begin to experiment with streaming their sets online and on different platforms. One difficulty is understanding when a band might be online — they can announce it on their band profile on social media, but how would a person stumble across their performance? How do you get the equivalent of the Friday afternoon “what’s on about town” when you’re craving that new music experience rather than following a band you already know, hoping they’ll perform?
And how do musicians get any compensation from their performance? It can’t be completely altruistic. People ought to be rewarded for providing entertainment.
There are some places you might look for streaming — but the problem with them is that when entering into their platform you are confronted with a bewildering amount of choice. It feels like jumping into a torrent of options and too much effort to find an experience you can connect with.
How can you find something good?
That’s where I want to be. I want to guide audiences to amazing entertainment that’s already out there. Performers are still wanting to connect with people and audiences are yearning for connection too.
I’ve looked at the top players in this space: Facebook Live, Instagram, YouTube & Twitch.
Twitch is superior since
you can discover new performers
you can immediately make a connection
the Twitch features are geared towards community interaction, unlike any other platform
performers post their schedules and show when they’re on next
Twitch musicians stream 24/7 from all around the globe so the amount of opportunity to be entertained and connect is limitless. I’ve begun to present and share some of best moments that Twitch Music has to offer here.
Twitch Music as an Incubator of Talent When Schitt$ Creek won copious Emmy Awards, I thought of the long collaborative career and friendship between Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, going back to SCTV when they were creating comedy in an incubator setting, where actors and writers honed their craft over time. The same incubator of talent is essential to musicians. Imagine if you could go back and watch The Beatles in their first performances at The Cavern in Liverpool. There’s a high potential of catching an amazing new artist in the early moments of shaping their career.
That allowance for music to incubate is one aspect of livestreaming that is built into the path on Twitch and something none of the social media platforms offer.
Now that I’ve discovered this amazing environment, I want to share it with as many people as possible. I want to guide audiences through the sheer volume of choice and help them find the best live music.
I’ve dedicated time navigating the livestream music scene to start connecting talented musicians to audiences that are hungry for those shared moments.
I hope you’ll join me at Stream Pilots