WORDS.

It's still hard to believe they did something right.

Allow me to paint a picture. It’s the summer of 2019. Though I’d graduated from university a year earlier, I was still recovering from burnout that had been accumulating since I took my A-levels. The maintenance loans I saved up during my time at uni had been getting me by, but by August, they were all gone. While I wasn’t at my lowest point ever (that was a few months earlier), I still wasn’t doing great by any stretch of the imagination. I was also incredibly lonely, which only compounded matters; I’d only stayed in contact with one or two people I went to high school with, and any meaningful connections made at university had dissipated once everyone went back home. Any notion of a career in music tech had disappeared as I barely scraped through my course, and retained next to no knowledge in the months after.

I’d been watching Sips on-and-off for several years, and had just started another phase of binge-watching when he posted a couple of clips of a karaoke game he’d been streaming. Looking it up, I found out it was “Twitch Sings”, a free-to-play game launched in April of that year. The premise was simple: you could sing along to thousands of songs, and post them for the world to see. However, the best feature was the “duet” mode, where you could take turns singing a song alongside a pre-recorded video someone else had made. You could then “open” your half of the duet for other people to sing along with later.

On a whim, I downloaded Twitch Sings on my very old laptop, plugged in a ginormous Blue Snowball microphone, connected my fairly new, unused Twitch account to the game, and completed a few duets with the videos Sips had posted. It was fun, but watching them back, it’s so obvious I’m trying to sound amazing.

Let me be perfectly clear: I enjoy singing, but I can’t sing. That’s why I’d always avoided karaoke in the past; I didn’t want people to think I was trying my hardest to sound good and still failing (which I would have been). However, Sips, with all due respect, couldn’t really sing either, and no one was laughing at him. After I was more comfortable with the premise, it got me thinking, if I couldn’t wow people with my abilities, could I just make them laugh instead?

Slowly but surely, I felt secure in my insecurities, butchering song after song. Through this, I “met” more and more players, and amassed a few dozen followers before I’d even streamed, as people were often inclined to follow others simply for duetting with them. Sometimes, I’d have a little gimmick, such as eating cereal during parts where I was supposed to sing, or just being absent entirely during “Nowhere Man”. To fill the awkwardness during sections with no vocals, I bought a kazoo for £1 on Wish, which ended up featuring in pretty much every duet I did from then on. I always watched the duets people did with me, to see how they reacted whenever I did something daft, and I’m sure some people were annoyed by my antics, but most seemed to enjoy them.

That’s when I decided to stream it myself.

I had streamed on Twitch before, but only on an old account to a couple of friends. I remember one time when I streamed The Sims 4, I noticed ten whole people were watching me, and I panicked and quickly ended the stream because the anxiety of so many people watching was just too much. It helped that only two or three people would watch me stream Twitch Sings at first, so I could slowly get accustomed to more viewers over time. Getting to chat in real time with the people I’d been singing with was a wonderful experience, and I found myself streaming it more and more. A few weeks later and I was being raided by streamers with over 20 viewers, which was just insane to me at the time. I quickly achieved all the goals to become an Affiliate by the end of 2019, meaning I was able to start making money from Twitch, which, at the time, meant making money from singing awfully. “Imagine if I did this for a living,” I thought. “Ah, it’ll never happen.”

Then the pandemic hit.

All of a sudden, everyone was at home all the time, and with nothing better to do, they tuned into Twitch. I was very lucky that I got into streaming when I did, as things picked up massively from March 2020 onwards (I’d only bought a PC that could actually play other games a few weeks prior). Though I wasn’t able to sing as much (I didn’t want to bother everyone I lived with), I moved on to other games, and before I knew it, partially thanks to a gargantuan cock-up by the DWP, I was streaming full-time. As a “job”.

An announcement was made in September 2020 that Twitch Sings was going to be shut down at the end of the year. Twitch, in their infinite wisdom, decided that money trumps all, and they would rather “invest in broader tools and services that will help support and grow the entire music community” than keep the game alive. As I write this in October of 2023, I can confirm they have done literally nothing to support the music community on Twitch, save for a deal that makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to anyone’s experience on the platform.

When Twitch Sings died, the community went a number of different ways. Some disappeared off Twitch, as the only reason they used the platform no longer existed. Others continued streaming, with mixed fortunes. While a few streamers found enormous success, many who exclusively streamed Twitch Sings had trouble finding their niche. To find out more, I highly recommend reading an article in The Washington Post from a couple of years ago.

Somehow, I managed to persist with streaming for three more wonderful years before I decided to pack it in. Twitch, as a whole, moved on from karaoke, but I don’t think it’s ever been anywhere near as fun since. Having said that, many connections I made through Twitch Sings are still going to this day. Of course, some connections were fleeting, and some have unfortunately been lost to the sands of time, but I still cherish them all the same. I often think about the people who used to sing with me, and I really hope life is treating them all fantastically well.

The beauty of Twitch Sings, without sounding corny, was that it brought so many people from all walks of life together in a way few other things ever could. Yes, there were hardcore gamers who played it, but there were also people who had never played a video game in their life. There were people from the UK and USA, all the way to the Philippines and Australia. There were students, and there were grandparents. There was never any drama or beef (to my knowledge), and no paranoia about whether the person you’re singing with is secretly a terrible person or whatever.

To say Twitch Sings connected people during the pandemic, while true, does it a disservice, because it was connecting people way before it too. I should know; everyone I’ve met, and all the great times I’ve had in the past few years, would never have happened had I not decided to make a fool of myself on that damn game.