When festivals were canceled and clubs closed their doors during the COVID-19 pandemic, DJs took the party online.
Hunting for alternative revenue streams with their primary income vanished, the world’s touring selectors launched record labels, sold production tutorial videos and sample packs, and, without a crowd to play for in-person, gigged from their living rooms, mixing for hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning in from their own couches via Twitch.
Once thought reserved for gamers and comedic streamers like Ninja and Kai Cenat, the popular livestream platform kept dance music afloat for two years. And while most DJs left Twitch to continue touring at the end of the pandemic, a steadfast community of artists and viewers stayed on the platform, which has now seen its number of DJ streamers more than quadruple since early 2020.
Now, that community is coming together to produce festiVAL, a unique hybrid IRL and streaming festival sponsored by Twitch that will unite its DJ community both in-person and on stream with a revolutionary performance format.
Debuting in Los Angeles on July 26-27, the 24-hour mini-festival will give online viewers an all-access view of the party in motion, with various camera angles of livestreamed performances and IRL streamers broadcasting from within the audience, while the chat from Twitch is projected at the venue for attendees and digital partygoers to connect with each other in real time.
But more than a technological feat, festiVAL and its backing from Twitch marks a turning point for DJs on the platform, as the streaming giant looks for new ways to support one of its fastest-growing and highest-earning but systematically challenged streaming categories.
Like many DJs, when the world shut down during the pandemic, festiVAL event producer Magda Halina “lost everything.” Just months after she graduated from Los Angeles’ prestigious ICON Collective music school in 2020, the California-born producer and DJ turned to streaming on Twitch in place of her canceled gigs and residency dates. Five years later, the digital dancefloors that were meant to be a stopgap remain her primary domain, in tandem with the in-person audiences where she got her start.
“It was supposed to just be a temporary thing, but the community that we built was really strong, Halina tells EDM Maniac via Zoom. “Eventually, things started to go back to normal, and most of the big touring acts went back to touring. But there was a lot of community that stuck around. We’re still here, 20,000 followers later, and still going strong.”
For other artists, such as festiVAL project lead Cace Spowboy, Twitch was the gateway to DJing altogether. With time away from work during the pandemic, the Boston-based musician and former audio software engineer came to the platform to get her music fix in the absence of in-person shows. Like Halina, she soon became hooked on the community she found on Twitch and was inspired to begin her own DJ journey.
“Finding the DJ community on Twitch suddenly felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is how I can reconnect,’” Cace Spowboy says on the call alongside Halina. “And I actually decided to quit my software engineering job and just fully commit to this community.”
Halina adds that while Twitch and other livestreamed DJ sets aren’t a replacement for playing to a live crowd, the platform helped her find a “new creative portal.”
“I enjoy both experiences in different ways,” she says. “On Twitch, I could rip a four to six-hour set, however long I want to go. I could go on whatever journey I want, and people could tune in, or they could leave. I can create my own space, and it’s given me the creative freedom to explore so many different genres and energy levels that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to if I was just playing live in front of a crowd all the time.”
In today’s club and festival environments, DJs are frequently forced to condense their artistic expression into one-hour timeslots and urged to cater their selections to social media algorithms. But on Twitch, where listeners tune in for hours at a time, personality and longer sonic journeys reign supreme, and DJs, mixing, moderating, and chatting all at once, facilitate deeper connections with their audiences—just by being themselves.
“That’s what I love about streaming, and why I’ve never really turned to TikTok or short-form video content,” Halina says. “Because I’m just not an actress, I’m not a scripter. So for me, [on stream] this is me; 100% raw; authentic.”
“What I’ve observed is the people who have the most success in streaming are the people who are radically authentic. They put their full personality our there,” Cace Spowboy adds. “I think that just attracts community in general and kind of cultivates it intrinsically.”
Though festiVAL isn’t the world’s first hybrid “IRL-URL” DJ event, when it debuts in Los Angeles later this month, it will mark one of the Twitch DJ and listener community’s largest and most prominent in-person gatherings to date, bringing together users from across the globe—many of whom have never had the chance to meet face to face.
“We don’t know what a lot of these people look like,” Halina says. “These are all real people and real connections, and it’s special in a different way, putting a face to a username when we get to bridge the IRL and URL. That’s why we’re doing this.”
Reflecting the spirit of the community it’s meant to serve, festiVAL’s diverse, female-majority lineup of more than 15 of Twitch’s most prominent streamers will soundtrack the 24-hour party, playing to a live crowd while simultaneously broadcasting to a combined audience of nearly 800,000 on their individual Twitch channels.
Leading the line are Anjuna heavyweights and touring-duo-turned-Twitch-favorites Gabriel & Dresden, and Grammy-nominated producer and remixer Chris Cox, joined by the superteam of Twitch DJ collectives and hybrid event pioneers behind festiVAL, comprising Halina’s own Audisoul events brand, known for its previous hybrid shows in partnership with Twitch, Teknokat222’s House is a Feeling, The Forever Quest’s Kindred, and artistic direction and MCing from the inimitable Valdudes, for whom festiVAL is named.
Celebrated visual artist and Twitch comedian TheSushiDragon, who has produced greenscreen presentations for brands like TwitchCon, BMW and American Eagle and has been co-signed by deadmau5, will curate live visuals for all 24 hours. Meanwhile, popular IRL streamers Dippedinpoison, McD00dle, and WhoIsChelsea will invite online viewers deep into the dance with their own broadcasts, chatting with attendees, pulling tarot cards, and checking out on-site food and vendors.
“Its more than just an event that happens to be live streamed,” Halina says. “Whether you’re on the stream or you’re there you feel like you’re part of both equally.”
“There are so many talented people in the community, just in general,” Cace Spowboy adds. When you put them all together, they build this amazing creative team. We have our core admin team; they’ve done events like this in the past. But then we also have our team of volunteers and people we’re bringing into the event. They stream on their own and they have all of their own individual creative outlets, so it’s an exercise in seeing how much we can achieve as a community, with all of our different talents.”
Despite the platform being a pandemic-era silver lining, it hasn’t been easy for DJs on Twitch. Previously, DJs who played pre-recorded music from other artists in their livestreamed sets on the platform were held liable for clearing applicable copyright permissions. Those who failed to do so faced muted audio, takedowns, strikes against their accounts and bans from the platform, as the company enforced DMCA penalties.
Though Twitch inked a historic deal with major record labels to allow DJs to play copyrighted music in their livestreams without takedowns in April 2024, to ensure no legal lines were crossed, streamers who opt-in to the platform’s new Twitch DJ Program must sacrifice a portion of their subscriber income to royalties.
To make up for the income hit, Twitch promised to use its reach to give its DJs additional exposure and support with their own dedicated category. But additional public doubt was cast on its future after Twitch’s Head of Music and the deal’s main broker, Cindy Charles, was tragically killed in a car accident just six months after the program’s launch.
That’s why, after years of uncertainty, Twitch’s official sponsorship of festiVAL marks one of several major steps toward the platform coming good on its promise to back its small but mighty DJ community, by putting its future in their hands.
“Them initiating the DJ program, obviously it comes with a cost, and it hurt a little bit when we found out,” Halina says of her initial reaction to the deal. “But at the end of the day, we have a secure job title and something that we know is going to last forever. We can feel secure in knowing that their way of trading off is by giving us the exposure that we were never able to get before.”
Previously pushed off the front page of the platform, DJs and their streams are now featured prominently on their own main page on the Twitch site. Last year, Audisoul became the first DJ collective to throw an official afterparty for TwitchCon, and festiVAL’s debut edition, set to stream life on Twitch’s front page, marks the first time the company has financially backed a DJ event of its scale.
“Coming back really strong with this event says we still care; we want this community; we want to invest in it; and we’re still here,” Cace Spowboy says of their investment.
“Nobody has been able to secure a deal with the major labels and do this officially and legally,” Halina adds. So now that they’re actually able to support us in this way it’s super helpful.”
Featured image courtesy: festiVAL.