2024 was a strange year in Howard’s World of Music. For the second year in a row, I didn’t really fall in love with any new artists (with one exception), but, at least this year I had an excuse. As you may know, we are preparing to move (probably in a year-ish) so I have started the long process of culling my music collection to the small number of albums and cds I want to keep. And that required spending a lot of time listening to music that I already have which is not a good formula for discovering anything new.
The other major change in my listening habits was the discovery of music on Twitch. Twitch is a video live-streaming service originally popular in the gaming community. It was designed to be a platform for content, including esports tournaments, personal streams of individual players, and gaming-related talk shows. A few years ago, Twitch made a concerted effort to extend the reach of the platform into musical and other artistic content. Thanks to Chris Jennings, I already had a twitch account and after the health nightmare that was Dec 2023, I was looking for a low-effort way to listen to music. I stumbled on Twitch music.
How does music work on Twitch? Imagine a radio program where a guest artist plays live. Except, that the artist and the DJ are the same person. Musicians stream on a regular schedule - three or four times a week for three or four hours a show. As you might imagine, most musicians don’t have enough material to just play music for all that time so there is also a great deal of “radio banter” about their life and music. There are also mechanisms for building a community around the artist. While they are streaming, twitch supports a text chat (based on the old irc code) and most of the streamers also have Discord servers which are not really servers but are private virtual communities on the global Discord server organized something like an old time bbs.
The economics of Twitch are pretty strange to me. Listeners can subscribe to a streamer for $6.48/mo (or more for higher “tiers”). Then there are a number of gamified options for tipping the streamer further. The power of community is used to incent users to tip the streamer beyond the basic subscription. All that is pretty straightforward. What seems insane to me is the amount of money that a small number of people drop. The streamers that I follow each have people who have gifted 1,000 or more subscriptions. At the old price of $5 or the new price of $6.48, that’s a lot of money. I have seen people come into a channel and drop hundreds of dollars. I am not notably cheap and I try to do my bit to support the artists I like, but I can’t imagine spending that much money directly on somebody and, if I did, doing it through a platform that takes a 40%-50% cut.
I started the year listening to a bunch of Twitch musicians. I am always amazed by how many talented musicians there are. I mean, I don’t play an instrument but there are a lot of “unknown” musicians whose music I enjoy. Most of the musicians on Twitch have some relationship to the music business many having albums out and available on the various streaming services. But the social pressure to keep contributing money has caused me to reduce the number of streamers that I listen to to those that I am willing to subscribe to. One in particular, Alanna Matty, is the new artist that I have listened to the most this year. I really enjoy her music.
2024 was a good but not great year on the concert front. We managed to see 21 ticketed (or reserved) shows which isn’t bad considering our first show wasn’t until April. It was a pretty good mix of old and new acts, acts that we had and had not seen before or had long been on the “see before they die” list, and acts from different genres. It lacked that one or two standout shows that would be “remembered forever” but there were a bunch of good ones including the Holly Bowling 2 night Colorado run, Delfeayo Marsalis & The Uptown Jazz Orchestra at the KUVO annual fundraiser, and Bruce Cockburn who we had not seen before but lived up to all the hype I’d heard over the years. The Alanna Matty 2 night Colorado run and a now rare local Mama Magnolia show were highlights among the less well-known acts.
We hit 15 different venues, 6 of which were new to us. Not sure if it will turn out to have been our last show at Red Rocks, but ending on Greensky Bluegrass with Holly Bowling would not be bad. We didn’t have the destination music for the first time in a few years which was sad. And, for various life reasons, it may be another few years before we get to do that again. (Here’s looking at you JazzFest 2027).