Streaming services are one of the biggest industries for music in the live-streaming era. Utilising our Chat analytics function, we here at Streams Charts analysed the mentions of various music streaming services in Twitch chats across the entire platform. With this, we can see which channels mention streaming services the most, which services are the most-mentioned across Twitch, and which users mention these services most often. The services we looked at for this dataset are Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Deezer, and Qobuz.
The users who mentioned these streaming services the most, across all services, were mainly bots. Bots don’t have the best reputation in internet culture, being regarded as tools for spam and mass messaging. However, Twitch allows streamers to connect a bot to their chatroom so that their fans can execute commands directly in the chat.
In regards to music streaming services, the application of bots is realised as a “!spotify” command; of course, other commands exist for other services. This command lets users grab a quick link to the streamer’s Spotify account or playlist. Not only useful for musicians on Twitch but many streamers who listen to music during their streams will have this command enabled. Not all streamers will set up this custom command, and the data for bots’ mentions showed some interesting deviations from the norm. Deezer, a free French music service, received more mentions from these bot commands than YouTube Music and Tidal, both of which are much more popular than Deezer in total mentions.
Languages distribution of mentions
Looking at the language data for these mentions, we can see English was a large majority of all chats where these services were mentioned. In total, we recorded over 1.77M mentions of these streaming services on Twitch across the last three months, and English messages made up 59.2% of these. The English-speaking creator with the most mentions was also the overall top channel: MandyPrater. MandyPrater is a Texan musician and hosts nearly exclusively music-orientated content on Twitch. Her chat command for her Spotify command helped her to receive the most streaming service mentions, with almost 20K more mentions than the second-best streamer, LVNDMARK.
More surprisingly, German was accountable for 11.6% of these total mentions. The German community is a large community on Twitch, but in terms of music service mentions they outperformed Spanish and Portuguese-speaking communities: both of which are generally larger than German. The German-speaking mentions were boosted by stegi, a German content creator whose chat hosted over 10K mentions of Spotify during the three-month period, which makes him the fourth-top channel overall in terms of music service mentions.
Spanish and Portuguese both received a significant portion of mentions, but no Spanish or Portuguese-speaking creators were at the top of mentions for this period. These two languages simply facilitate a large portion of the traffic in Twitch chats rather than relying on one specific streamer to boost their metrics.
French hosted more mentions than Italian, but the language of love was also boosted by mentions of Deezer. The French music platform was mainly popular with French-speaking creators and the majority of Twitch channels to see the highest number of mentions for this service were largely French-speaking, although some exceptions were to be found.
Turkish was accountable for 2.8% of the total mentions, and this language was boosted by creator RRaenee. The Turkish gaming content creator hosted the most mentions of YouTube Music on Twitch and was the only channel to see more than 1,000 mentions of the red streaming service.
Dynamics of Chat mentions
Looking at the dynamics of the Chat mentions for each platform, we can see just how astronomically popular Spotify is. Spotify was by far the most popular streaming service by mentions; it was so popular that we needed to add an extra axis to the right side of the graphic just to fit it into the picture.
Apple Music was normally the second-most popular streaming service on Twitch, although it was shortly overtaken by Deezer and Tidal. The large spikes in the mentions for Apple Music directly coincided with some album releases of popular musicians. The first large spike in mentions on the 30th of June coincided with the release of Pink Tape by Lil Uzi Vert, and the second peak on the 28th of July with UTOPIA by Travis Scott. Both of these albums debuted at the top of the music charts and the effect of their popularity was even visible on Twitch.
Although the mentions for Spotify seem to be slowly declining throughout the three-month period, not all of the streaming services faced the same fate. Tidal, for example, saw a large jump in its mentions towards the tail-end of the period and the mentions for this platform were slowly increasing throughout the three months.
Overall, Spotify was by far the most popular streaming platform in terms of Twitch Chat mentions and English made up a large majority of these mentions. However, certain communities and smaller platforms appear to have found a niche for themselves on Twitch. The German community is discussing streaming services a lot more than larger communities and Deezer receives solid community support from French content creators and streamers. The interplay of music and streaming is only becoming more prominent as Twitch diversifies and moves away from pure gaming-related content, and the chat mention dynamics help us to understand how this interplay functions. As Twitch continues to dive into the mainstream, music will retain a topic of interest and exploration.
