The data behind music's rapid growth on Twitch

Amidst all the ongoing buzz around livestreaming in the music industry, I realized that one crucial element has been missing from nearly all conversations on the topic: Actual data.

How many music livestreams are taking place on any given day, and how many people are tuning in? How does the growth in music livestreaming activity overall compare to that of other kinds of livestreams, such as gaming?

A Water & Music member recently tipped me off on a third-party analytics site called Twitchmetrics, which tracks stats such as daily concurrent and absolute viewership, follower count and follower growth across all channels on Twitch.

I dug through the data on Twitch’s Music & Performing Arts category, and found a lot of interesting insights that reveal not just how rapidly music on Twitch has growth since early March, but also how much longer it has to go to match the popularity of video-game streaming on the platform.

Tl;dr

• Daily average viewership for music on Twitch was mostly flat, at around 5,000 to 8,000 average concurrent viewers a day, until mid-March — the moment major festivals and promoters began cancelling their events on a mass scale.
• Since then, average music viewership on Twitch has more than quadrupled.
• But there are only around 150 music channels active at any given time, and viewership for music as an entire category is still only around 10–20% that of many individual games, including Fortnite and League of Legends.
• While concert promoters are attracting more views, artists are attracting more followers.

Disclaimers

• All of my finding are as of yesterday, April 23, 2020, and will likely change further in the coming weeks and months. I’ll make sure to issue a similar report in the future if there are any significant changes in the data.
• There’s a potential categorization issue around what exactly counts as a “music stream” on Twitch. For instance, if a given gaming streamer broadcasts their experience with Travis Scott’s show in Fortnite, they cannot categorize their stream as both a music and Fortnite stream. They can only choose one; in this case they will probably go with Fortnite, which means that that stream will be factored into calculations of consumption activity only for Fortnite, not for Music & Performing Arts. This potentially skews consumption inaccurately away from music, especially as more artists start to perform concerts in existing game environments.

Music & Performing Arts on Twitch: Category overview

Twitchmetrics provides genre-level viewership history going back a maximum of three months.

For the Music & Performing Arts category, we can see below that average concurrent viewers hovered at around 5,000 to 8,000 a day between January and mid-March, after which activity began increasing significantly:

To make this change more digestible, I aggregated Twitchmetrics’ daily viewership numbers for music into weekly buckets for the past eight weeks — visualized below:

This is probably the most important chart of the entire article.

After several months of stagnant activity around the music category, we can clearly see here that weekly music viewership on Twitch nearly doubled within the span of two weeks, specifically between March 8 and March 21. Not coincidentally, this was right after SXSW got cancelled, and around the same time that Live Nation and AEG decided to halt all tours due to COVID-19 concerns (as I labeled on the chart).

Ever since, viewership has more than doubled again, as more and more virtual festivals as well as individual artists turn to Twitch to engage with fans. All in all, weekly average concurrent viewership for music on Twitch has more than quadrupled in the past eight weeks, from 6,365 concurrent viewers to 27,761 concurrent viewers.

While this illustrates rapid growth, it still pales in comparison to the popularity of gaming on Twitch.

As of April 23, 2020, the Music & Performing Arts category ranks #13 on the list of top “genres” on Twitch by average number of concurrent live channels, #17 by total viewer hours in the past 30 days and #18 by peak concurrent viewer count in the past 30 days. Keep in mind that most of the other top Twitch genres are individual games like Fortnite, not general umbrella categories like music.

In other words, there are several individual game titles that each have more concurrent viewership and streaming activity on the platform than the entire music category combined.

For instance, Minecraft alone attracts nearly twice the average views of the entire music category combined, despite having roughly the same number of streamers at any given time. League of Legends alone attracts nearly eight times the viewership of the entire music category, with around three times as many active streamers on average.

See below for a visualized comparison:

The top music channels on Twitch

What exactly is driving this 4x growth of music on Twitch?

To answer this question, we can look at the top rankings on the Twitchmetrics site built around three different metrics: total viewer hours, average concurrent viewership and follower increase, all measured over a 30-day period.

Most-watched music channels:

To clarify terminology around the content type here:

• “Live performance” refers both to live musical performances and to live DJ sets.
• “Concert replays” refers to live viewing experiences of archival footage of past concerts.
• “Music production” refers to live music production sessions, often involving producers sharing their laptop screens.
• “24/7 radio” refers to a lean-back, audio-first radio experience.

The above chart confirms a lot of widespread hypotheses about what kinds of music are most popular on Twitch.

For instance, I’ve written in the past about how electronic music has a natural affinity with the gaming industry, in terms of its software-driven, repetitive aesthetic style that fits well with typical gameplay.

Twitchmetrics confirms this affinity with data: Half of the 10 most-watched music channels on Twitch focus on EDM. Hip-hop, another genre that is fostering increasingly close ties with gaming, accounts for two of the most-watched channels.

Another hypothesis I’ve formed around the modern livestreaming economy is that the model of individual artists streaming solely to their existing fans, without a solid infrastructure for discovery, feels quite atomized, isolated and unsustainable. Group-based or collective livestreaming efforts have a better chance of reaching larger audiences and keeping up a regular livestream schedule over time.

Twitchmetrics’ rankings also confirm this hypothesis: Eight out of the 10 most-viewed channels belong to music organizations, not to individual artists.

Half of those organizations are event promoters (e.g. Insomniac, Lost Lands), with the remaining half split 50/50 between record labels (e.g. Mad Decent, Monstercat) and other kinds of music companies like online music stores (Beatport) and radio stations (KISS Radio Taiwan). Only two artists or bands — Kenny Beats and The Roots, both in or adjacent to hip-hop — rank in the top 10.

Looking at Twitchmetrics’ list of the top 10 music channels by average concurrent viewers, the rankings look similar in terms of genre as well as company type, with the small difference that artists/bands now make up 40% of the list:

Follower counts, though, paint quite a different picture from viewership numbers alone.

Below are the most-followed music channels on Twitch as of yesterday:

There are four takeaways here.

One, none of the ten most-followed music channels are affiliated with a major label, publisher or event promoter. In fact, you probably won’t recognize most of their names.

This reflects one of my findings a few months back that virtually no major artist was active on Twitch prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the most active and vibrant music communities centering around independent artists and labels instead. This is in part because major artists likely didn’t have the bandwidth to livestream to Twitch on a consistent enough basis to keep audiences interested and engaged.

Two, six out of the ten most-followed music channels belong to artists, not companies. This is likely because promoters and other music organizations have been relatively slow to adopt Twitch as a regular outlet for marketing or community-building. Instead, to date, Twitch has largely been decentralized and centered on individual personalities.

Three, EDM and hip-hop collectively make up only 40% of the most-followed music channels. Instead, to my surprise, rock, folk and other multi-genre channels dominate.

Four, aside from Insomniac, none of the most-followed music channels are currently the fastest-growing music channels. The majority of the most-followed music streamers were early adopters of Twitch, and benefited from a relatively more open and uncrowded playing field several years back.

In contrast, the top 10 chart for largest follower growth in music looks more familiar and more driven by newer adopters of Twitch:

While organizations are bringing in the most viewership, individual artists are bringing in the most followers.

This makes sense in the same way that artists, rather than organizations, run the most popular profiles on Instagram and YouTube — which is also related to how many of the most popular artists on Twitch are treating the platform like a social network, not just like a concert or performance outlet. (For instance, a significant aspect of Kenny Beats’ Twitch experience is his subscriber-only Discord server.)

Assuming that music will continue to grow on Twitch — especially given their recent music hires — we can expect its top follower chart for music to look quite different in a few months, as more major artists, promoters and other organizations start to invest long-term in the platform.