Spotify For Artists product lead, Tracy Chan, joins Twitch: ‘I believe there’s a massive opportunity to help artists connect with their fans through live streaming.’

Twitch, the Amazon-owned live streaming platform best known for its association with video games, is becoming increasingly important in music circles.

As COVID-19 renders live music essentially null and void for the foreseeable future, Twitch, with its multiple millions of concurrent viewers, has fast become even more of a key destination for live streaming activity for artists.

As Twitch moves closer to the music business, of course, its internal team may wish to build more products and tools for artists and rightsholders – which brings us to some big news today.

Twitch has announced the hire of Tracy Chan as Head of Product and Engineering for Music.

The company has poached Chan from Spotify, where he was the Director of Product Management.

At Spotify, Chan primarily focused on leading product strategy and development for Creator platforms and developing analytics tools for artists and labels, including Spotify for Artists and Spotify Analytics.

Chan joined Spotify in 2016 when the music streaming platform bought his startup, CrowdAlbum – a social, photo, and video aggregator that created a “visual history” of musical events from around the world. CrowdAlbum worked with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Garth Brooks, Pearl Jam, Macklemore, Lil Wayne and Linkin Park.

“As Twitch looks to expand its offerings for music creators and within the music industry as a whole, I am confident that together with the team, we will be able to build the necessary tools to support artists now and as they continue to explore their new virtual stage.”

Tracy Chan, Twitch (pictureD)

Prior to founding CrowdAlbum, Chan was a product manager at YouTube, where he designed and launched YouTube Insight, the company’s flagship analytics platform for Creators.

At Twitch, Chan joins a growing music team under the helm of Mike Olson, the former Pandora exec who was named SVP, Head of Music at Twitch last year.

According to a Twitch spokesperson, Chan will focus on evolving the Twitch experience specifically for live music and helping artists and fans better connect in real-time.

Tracy Chan said: “I have spent my career building Creator tools and I believe there is a massive opportunity to help artists connect with their fans through virtual performances and live streaming, which is what led me to Twitch. Across the board, and especially at this moment in time, we are seeing disruption in the music industry as artists are having to find new ways to both make money and interact with fans.

“As Twitch looks to expand its offerings for music creators and within the music industry as a whole, I am confident that together with the team, we will be able to build the necessary tools to support artists now and as they continue to explore their new virtual stage.”

“Tracy is joining our team at a critical moment as we continue to see growing interest from both new and established musical talent joining Twitch.”

Michael Olson, Twitch

Michael Olson, SVP, Head of Music at Twitch added: “The music category on Twitch has been growing organically for quite some time and we have some amazing artists and talent using the service to create and share live, interactive experiences with their fans. At a fundamental level, Twitch was built for Creators and we are investing more heavily in building unique product and monetization tools for our music Creators.

“Tracy is joining our team at a critical moment as we continue to see growing interest from both new and established musical talent joining Twitch. His experience in developing video and music Creator tools will be invaluable to our team as we pursue new ways to support artists and connect them to their fans around the world.”

We’re told that, in addition to working with big-name talent like John Legend and Willie Nelson, Twitch is investing in new streaming and monetization tools to support independent artists, including its recent partnerships with companies including SoundCloud and Bandsintown to help establish Affiliate status on Twitch.

Earlier this year, Athena Koumis, formerly of XITE and Spotify, also joined the team as the Music Partnerships Manager.Music Business Worldwide