Streaming for the win

Anthony Chapman is a musician who was diagnosed with MS a few years ago. In this article we chat to him about how he started streaming his music and beat making on Twitch and why he is helping the MS Trust make a theme tune for our new podcast series.

During lockdown a lot of people started taking part in a variety of online activities, such as getting your parents to make dance videos on TikTok, endless online quizzes, yoga classes and of course lots of gaming! One platform that saw a lot of new activity was the gaming streaming app Twitch.  Although Ant had had a Twitch account for several years he hadn’t really used it much. By trade, Ant is a musician, educator and music producer. While his teaching and producing could still take place during lockdown, live gigs had to stop. (Ant plays in his bands Collapsed Lung and Arndales).

So after watching more and more non-gamers use Twitch for things other than gaming, Ant decided to have a go himself. Ant enjoyed working on other people’s songs, such as remastering and producing, but was keen to get back to making some music for himself. He decided to try streaming himself writing and creating his own music to see if people would watch him, he thought it would give him the extra push he needed to start making his own music again. And it worked! After a few months of streaming Ant had made more music than in the previous 10 years. Plus he had created a nice online community of people who showed up every week to watch him make his music. The group of people interacting with Ant via the chat were having lots of fun and learning a lot about how to make beats.

We recently approached Ant to see if he would be willing to make our new podcast theme song and he was game so to say! In MS Awareness week we are launching a new series of podcasts called “Me MySelf and I” which is concentrating on the lives of people affected by MS during a year of lockdown. Ant himself is one of our stories, talking about his diagnoses and how having MS has impacted on his life in music. 

“I think the MS trust is a brilliant source of information, if I want to try and find something out about something related to MS, the MS Trust website is always my first port of call.”

So on the 19 March at 8pm you can tune in on Twitch to watch and take part in the theme song being made. You don’t have to have a Twitch account to view, but if you want to chat you need to register and get an account. It would be fantastic to get lots of people with MS viewing and taking part to make our new theme song.

During the weekend of 20-21 March the MS Trust is also holding another event on Twitch, an MS Play game challenge weekend, if you would like to take part in this have a look.