No time like the present

With musicians finding it harder to find traditional performing engagements, some players have found a profitable way to make livestreaming work for them

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Cellist Emily Davidson finds livestreaming allows the audience a closer connection with the musician

EMILY DAVIDSON

When lockdowns and venue closures suddenly forced musicians everywhere to go online to find an audience, a few string players had already established a regular online following by livestreaming their playing on YouTube or Twitch.

For these musicians, and those who started livestreaming consistently during the pandemic, the activity has been a way to develop and interact with an online community. Musicians earn income from streaming through subscriptions, donations and by playing special requests, but also from signposting their audience to other, often more profitable, online content. And through streaming, players have made connections with fellow musicians, sourced work opportunities and found new students.

Filipino violinist and composer Diwa de Leon started uploading violin covers of video game music to YouTube in 2008, and by 2013 had acquired a large enough audience that he quit his film scoring and teaching to focus on his online work. In 2017 he began livestreaming on YouTube and then Twitch, the streaming platform where video gameplay makes up the majority of broadcast content. When demand for online content soared in 2020, de Leon started streaming on Twitch three times a week. ‘Success for me during the pandemic was how many people paid to subscribe to my channel,’ he says. ‘My viewership was usually 80 to 100, but one time Twitch featured me on its front page and my viewership skyrocketed to 20,000, which took my take-home pay to nearly $3,000 for just one two-hour stream.’ Now de Leon is back to streaming just once a week, and uses Twitch to engage with his online fanbase and as a funnel to take people to his YouTube channel, which has over 230,000 subscribers. He says: ‘My main business plan has always been about passive income from advertising revenue on YouTube, and from people clicking on iTunes or Spotify links from my YouTube videos to lead to the more profitable side of my music business – the violin covers I’ve made of music from various video game franchises.’

‘There have been times where I’ve been asked to sightread Paganini’ – Julia Dina, violinist

Los Angeles-based Baroque cellist Emily Davidson has been livestreaming on YouTube since 2014 as part of her freelance performing and teaching career. ‘So few classical musicians were doing something like that back then,’ she says, ‘and with people hungry for that kind of content, it helped me build an audience for my work.’ For Davidson, livestreaming allows the audience a much closer connection with the musician than watching a recorded video, and the performer’s ability to respond in real time to online chatroom questions and comments adds a level of interaction that cannot be matched in a concert setting. Davidson uses the subscription platform Patreon, and boosts her income through donations via PayPal and Venmo. She says livestreams can be an effective fundraising tool for other projects: ‘People are much more inclined to donate to something when you’re giving them live attention, as opposed to just directing them to a donation page.’ Livestreaming has also brought new students to Davidson’s teaching practice, especially those looking to learn Baroque style.

ALBERTO GIORDANO

Yale School of Music graduate Julia Dina has also found students through livestreaming, and teaches them violin online. After launching a Twitch channel in 2020, she gave up a concertmaster job for a home-based career of recording, producing, streaming and teaching. She supplements her twiceweekly livestreams, where she earns income through donations, priority requests and subscriptions, with producing YouTube content and recording violin covers, and says: ‘Livestreaming has led directly to other work, such as people wanting me to record violin for their album.’ Planning for her three-hour streams isn’t time-consuming, says Dina, because for the most part she improvises through them. ‘The music requests depend who’s in chat,’ she says. ‘I’ve had streams where it was nearly all anime or video game music, others that were almost all pop, and lots of classical and orchestral music. And there have been times where I’ve been asked to sightread Paganini.’

Berklee-trained violinist and vocalist Jo Cleary also livestreams on Twitch, using a looper in her own arrangements of video game music, pop and Celtic music, among other genres. Her Twitch income derives from subscriptions, donations and occasional sponsorships, and like Dina (with whom she studies after finding her on the platform), Cleary says her channel has led directly to collaborative work. ‘Twitch’s Raids tool lets you send your audience to another streamer,’ she explains, ‘so even though I’m saying goodbye to the 300 people watching me, I can send those 300 people to another musician or creator. I’ve been able to connect with a lot of other musicians this way, and we end up working together.’ Cleary says that there is an adrenaline rush to livestreaming, but she makes sure to step away for scheduled breaks during her four-hour streams, which are about 50:50 talking to playing. ‘With my freelance work, I’m very business-minded and professional,’ she says, ‘but my Twitch audiences are always reminding me to relax and take my time, and that they just want to hang out, so I have to tell myself to not take it quite so professionally.’