Twitch’s Streaming Boom Is Jolting the Music Industry
Long an afterthought to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Twitch has won over musicians. Now it must deal with their lawyers.
Photographer: Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images
On the morning of May 27, Kenneth Charles Blume III wanted to talk about white privilege. Blume, a 29-year-old DJ from Greenwich, Connecticut, has produced beats for some of the biggest rappers in the game, including Vince Staples, Freddie Gibbs and JPEGMAFIA, under the pseudonym Kenny Beats. Having benefited directly from Black culture, he felt an urge to speak out after the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota days earlier.
To vent, he turned to Twitch, a video site owned by Amazon.com Inc. He began his performance, which would go on for more than two hours, by saying he was in a foul mood. He then responded to a viewer question about the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit organization that bails out low-income people from jail. Blume urged his viewers to donate. “A lot of us who grew up poor have white privilege,” he said. “I’m trying to normalize the idea of talking about this.”