My Virtual Gig-Like Thing
Written by Piers Cawley on , updated
On Thursday the 9th of April at 7pm UK time, I’m streaming my first attempt at a full folk club style gig from my study to my Twitch stream and I would love for you to be there.
On Thursday the 9th of April at 7pm UK time, I’m streaming my first attempt at a full folk club style gig from my study to my Twitch stream and I would love for you to be there.
Schedule
It all kicks off at 7pm, UK time with a kind of Q&A session and introduction to Twitch for newcomers. I’m particurly planning to help other independent musicians reach their audience through the platform.
Then, I plan to follow the Royal Traditions/Singing Together format of two forty minute sets of folk material with a 10 minute refreshment and raffle break in the middle.
After the folk club concert I’ll be jumping onto Twitch Sings to round out the evening singing implausible songs with friends from that community and any folky friends who’ve managed to get themselves up on Twitch by then. I’m hoping it’ll be a lot of fun.
Ticket Prices
It’s the internet! It won’t cost you a penny to watch me perform. However, right now, daft stuff like this is my only potential source of income, so I would be deeply grateful if you could either “Buy me a coffee” via Ko-Fi or sign up for a free Twitch account and subscribe to my channel.
Free money for your favourites!
If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber and you don’t yet have a Twitch Subscription, there’s a wonderful thing you can do that means that Amazon will give me (or any other streamer you enjoy) some money and it won’t cost you a penny. Sign up for Twitch Prime, which is just like a regular twitch account, but you can subscribe to one channel for free each month. The streamer gets paid by Twitch as if you’d signed up for a regular subscription, but you don’t get charged a penny because you’re already paying Amazon for your Prime account. The only difference between a Prime subscription and a regular one on Twitch is that you can’t set up a Prime sub to renew. If you would like to keep making regular payments to the streamer of your choice, you need to remember to resubscribe every month.
One off tips
A Ko-Fi coffee comes in at £3, but if you want to tip me or any other twitch performer with an arbitrary amount, then Twitch Bits are your friend. You buy ’em from Twitch and can then use them as a virtual currency. For the performer, 100 bits is equivalent to $1, but they will cost you more than that to buy, because Twitch are (understandably, it’s not a cheap platform to run!) going to have to take a cut somewhere. By loading it on the cost of bits to the giver, they make things really transparent. It’s not like the weird alchemy where you pay a music streaming site 69p for a track or whatever and, unbeknownst to you unless you really dig into it, the artist sees maybe 6p of that.
Other performers have other ways for you to support them, whether it be public amazon wishlist, paypal tip jar, patreon page or some other service I’ve not heard of yet. In some ways, it’s never been easier for you to support the work of artists you love.