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Live Streaming for Musicians and Artists (Ultimate Guide)

In Guides for Musicians , Guides for Singers , Guides for songwriters by Jake L Leave a Comment

Live streaming on platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook has become a prominent form of entertainment for many people, especially after what’s been happening around the world this past year. Since you’re here, you might be wondering, is live streaming for musicians and music artists too? Is it worth dedicating time to it? Well to give you a short answer, yes it definitely is!

More and more creators of different genres of entertainment are diving into the realm of streaming, musicians and music artists included. Even Twitch, the streaming platform with most of the market share at the moment in the space, has a category/channel for musicians and artists, and people who are looking to watch these types of streams.

Think of it like you’re giving a virtual concert to anyone who is watching your stream. The opportunity is there, but there is a bunch of things you need to learn when it comes to setting up your live streaming channels. Don’t worry, we’re here to help! Here’s our ultimate live streaming for musicians and artist guide for 2021.

Why Musicians and Artist Should Live Stream

Build a Community Around Your Music

Musician singer songwriter performs live on Twitch Stream

Live streaming platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook can be used to build up the connection you have with your listeners. Your audience gets more of a personal experience when watching your live stream. Unlike watching a video of yours or listening to your song on music streaming platforms like Spotify, a live stream is more engaging.

Fans and viewers can literally talk to you live as you perform and stream for them. As humans, we all long for connections with others, so being able to connect with an artist that they enjoy listening to on this type of personal level is so amazing, even for the artist themselves. You’ll start building friendships with viewers which makes them more inclined to support your music and brand.

Bonus Tip: When live streaming on platforms like Twitch, it’s very important to engage with your chat. The chat is where you see everyone talking and sending messages for you to read while you are live. The better you get at responding to people talking in chat, the more engaging your live streams will be. Overall, this leads to more concurrent viewers who are active during your streams.

Grow Your Brand as an Artist

Musician on stage looking forward to her future.

As I already mentioned earlier, you’re going to need to grow your brand as an artist, the person, and the name behind the music. Live streaming on platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, even Facebook are great for this purpose because it gives you the opportunity to connect to your fans on a personal level.

Unlike touring and doing live performances on stage, streaming reveals a different side of you as an artist. You’ll most likely be streaming from the comfort of your own room at times, bringing your fans, both old and new into your space. You can do live performances on stream or even utilize this time streaming to chat with your fans.

Show everyone who enjoys listening to your music that you’re a real person too. This allows you to be more relatable to your fans , a very important factor nowadays as we tend to gravitate towards artists to who we can relate.

You give your audience a behind-the-scenes look at who you are as an artist and as a person. Don’t overlook the importance of building these relationships with your audience, especially in the early stages of your music career.

Potentially Reach More People (Twitch Being an Exception)

While people can argue that Twitch (the streaming platform of choice for many) isn’t a very “discoverable” platform to start with, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.

What I’ve learned is that in order for you to grow your following on live streaming platforms like Twitch, you’re gonna need to bring viewers from somewhere else (YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and more!)

This will help you increase your viewer count while you stream live on Twitch, which can bump you higher in “watch categories” and potentially getting picked up by the recommendation algorithm implemented on the platform. This is why I say you can potentially reach new listeners, just keep in mind that you’re going to need to grow on more discoverable platforms (TikTok and YouTube) and slowly migrate your followers to your live streams.

YouTube on the other hand is a very discoverable platform so I highly recommend utilizing it for your live streams too. Your best bet is to multistream to multiple streaming platforms at the same time which is easily done with software like StreamLabs OBS . This brings us to our next topic, the benefits of multistreaming.

Multistreaming to Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook

Multistreaming to Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook

Like we already said, Twitch is known to be the platform of choice for live streaming, but you can’t count out Social Media platform giants such as YouTube and Facebook. These platforms are quickly growing and have a good chance at catching up to Twitch soon.

As live streaming content becomes more mainstream, we will begin to see more platforms coming out rivaling against Twitch.

This all leads to the topic of multistreaming to multiple platforms simultaneously and why it could be the right move for you at this moment.

How to Multistream on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook

There are many ways to multistream utilizing software, but the one I personally use is Streamlabs OBS (SLOBS) Prime. I already stream using SLOBS so I found it easier for me to upgrade to a Prime account to unlock Multistreaming and other features. Do keep in mind that it does cost more to upgrade to Streamlabs OBS Prime, however, for the user-friendly interface of SLOBS and the added features, I found it all worth it.

Benefits to Multistreaming

Reach a Wider Audience

Artist performing in front of crowd

One of the biggest benefits of multistreaming is the ability to reach more people, potentially having more viewers concurrently watching your live stream. For me personally, at this moment, I found that about 60% of my viewers during my live streams are on Twitch while 40% of them are on YouTube and Facebook.

Right now, Twitch is known to be the place to go for live content. Like I mentioned earlier, other platforms are starting to catch up. Viewers in chat have expressed their thoughts on why they prefer YouTube over Twitch, so keep that in mind before making a decision to go exclusive on one platform.

Ever since I started multistreaming, I have found that my overall stream has grown a significant amount. Both my Twitch and YouTube channels have been growing consistently in followers and concurrent viewers. It’s still too early to tell which platform I’m going to prioritize in the future, but for now, I’ll continue to keep having fun with the multistream.

Experiment to see Which Platform is Best for You

The reason I started multistreaming was to see which platform would be best for me. While the majority of streamers tend to lean towards Twitch as their primary live streaming platform, I didn’t want to discount YouTube and Facebook yet. Musicians and artists who plan to use live streaming as a way to grow their brand and connect with their audience are different from the typical “gaming streamers” which is the majority in this space.

Use multistreaming to find the platform you enjoy streaming on most. If you already have a following on YouTube, you might even find it best to live stream there as opposed to Twitch and Facebook. When you’re just starting out, don’t limit yourself and try to be as spread out as possible. Once you find that one platform is working better than others, that’s when you can begin to double down your efforts on whichever one it is.

Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket

Something to keep in mind as you continue to grow your brand on social media platforms, Twitch and YouTube included, is to be well spread out with your content. The worst thing to happen is losing everything you’ve built because of the closure of your account on a platform.

Multistreaming allows you to potentially build more than one platform at the same time. This is the best way to build your brand as an artist on Social Media and live streaming platforms, to ensure longevity in the future.

What Types of Streams Should You Do?

Music Performances

Me performing an original song live on a Twitch Stream

Like I already mentioned, you can set up a stream to be like a virtual concert. Whether it’s just playing some tunes while having the stream on, or organizing an entirely virtual event, make it fun and personal for your viewers.

Unlike concerts in the public, you have more of a chance of engaging with your audience in chat, even answer questions that they may ask in real-time. All of this at the same time as performing your music.

Keep in, the best part of watching a live stream is feeling the personal connection with the streamer. Don’t worry about having to make it a super high-budget virtual concert. Your main goal is to show your viewers a new side of the person who’s making the music they enjoy listening to.

Just Chatting

Just chatting streams are very fun, stress-free, and are great for having engaging conversations with your supportive fans and viewers. These types of streams are also good if you’re trying to promote a new project and even build more rapport with your fanbase.

Gaming?

The majority of the live streams online consists of people playing their favorite video games. The gaming community has its own culture that has grown alongside the streaming community. Gaming and streaming over the years have developed an online culture. I would only recommend you play games on stream if you’re a music artist who enjoys playing them. You don’t want to try and force yourself to play as you won’t enjoy your time and your viewers can pick up on that.

They will see it as disingenuine, turning them off from your stream and potentially your brand as a music artist.

Final Thoughts

As the world of Live Streaming continues to grow, more and more music artists are joining the fun, utilizing Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook to build their overall brand. Do keep in mind that streaming does have a learning curve that can be overwhelming to those who have no experience with it.

Just keep at it as the payoffs can be worth it in the end and you might find yourself enjoying the process of live streaming. If you have any questions you would like to ask, send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll try to help you!

Good luck and have fun streaming!

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