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Musicians on Twitch: Creativity, Struggles, and the Reality Behind Live Streaming offers the first large scale study of music and musicians on the live streaming platform Twitch. Drawing on interviews with ‘musician-streamers’, extensive online observation and longitudinal data gathered between 2020 and 2026, the book argues that Twitch has produced a new kind of practitioner whose work combines technical, relational and artistic competencies in ways that older categories of musical labour cannot fully capture. It examines what musicians on Twitch actually do, how they are remunerated for it, how they seek to remain visible in a crowded attention economy, and what those efforts cost them. Neither celebratory nor dismissive, the book offers a grounded empirical account of musical work under contemporary conditions of platformisation. It is essential reading for academics, students and anyone interested in the intersections of music, technology and creative labour in the digital age.
Arthur Ehlinger is a postdoctoral researcher at CREATE, University of Glasgow, whose work investigates how digitalisation affects the creative industries.