For Twitch music creator Jyoty, building an audience starts with being a fan first

As a teenager growing up in Amsterdam, Jyoty Singh would take a train then a ferry to London (because she wasn’t old enough to buy a plane ticket), where she would dance to music in the clubs until 6 a.m. and make the trip back home in the morning. Jyoty’s family wanted her to go down a traditional career path. “My Indian parents always wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she remembered. And even though she did well in school, music was everything. “That love for music throughout my teens just kept growing bigger and bigger.”

Yeah, I think that’s true, and that’s also why, for example, Twitch has been so important. Even though I’ve gone back to touring, I’m still really into streaming. That’s because it’s exactly the same as what radio has done for me. People didn’t know me in person in Malaysia or in New York, they knew me because they heard me every week through the airwaves. And that’s where my powerful connections came from—having this online relationship with total strangers who really felt like they knew me and I felt like I knew them. That’s what really catapulted my career outside of the UK.

I always say because I’m a ‘90s baby, we kind of all grew up in this weird mashup era where it was normal to listen to Blink 182, but also to Christina Milian. I come from Amsterdam so when I was growing up, you would go to a hip-hop party but you would hear dancehall, you’d hear some R&B, you’d hear some deep house. I can sing certain Moroccan songs from start to finish, but I definitely don’t speak Moroccan. All these years later, when I [perform], that’s all you’re hearing, it’s everything I’ve heard growing up. And still, all day every day, I’m looking for music. I do Jyoty radio on Twitch where people send me their music, and on a Monday or Tuesday stream, I go through the inbox and the chat decides what’s hot or not, and what’s hot gets played on radio and what’s not gets constructive criticism.

I started thinking during lockdown a lot about what actually makes a good [performance]. There are the typical things like building on timing and momentum—it’s this primal feeling that can give someone goosebumps. That’s something that’s in between beats. Then I thought about the best sets I’ve ever been to and why were they so big? Then I realized something, very often, I’d want to grab the mic and say something to the crowd. But a really good [performer] can relay that message without talking. So that’s what I’m working on in every gig is getting my message across simply by letting the music do the talking. That’s what works well in the sense of connecting to your audience. I think you really need to dig deeper to figure out what it is that makes you stand out from the rest.

It’s so interesting, all of my Twitch family, they weren’t people I had ever spoken to on Instagram, they weren’t people that knew of my radio show. They were all brand new people. I think they all discovered me through raids. These people that you don’t know but you all know you like the same music, they’ll say this stream is ending so let’s go to that person’s stream. That’s how I built my Twitch audience. They had never seen me in person, they didn’t know about my radio show. I popped up on their streams one day and they just stuck around. Obviously, once I became more fluid with streaming I would start posting about it on social media, but the core audience came from within Twitch.

After all these years of working with brands and the world’s biggest clients is that if the client doesn’t get it, it will never translate. You could have all the money in the world, but if the person at the top doesn’t really care, it’ll get lost. We live in an age of democracy online. Someone who could never make it big through the traditional infrastructure are now going about it their own way. I think brands need to really catch on that they are no longer in control. You need to please the consumers. We as consumers are going to buy your shoes or watch your movie. But be honest with us and show us that you care. That’s the key to success, whether it’s a personal brand or a massive consumer brand, is transparency where people can feel like they can relate to you.

I just genuinely get so much energy and hunger by being around people who are eager to learn. What’s really rewarding is seeing someone else pick it up. I remember when I did a six-week course for South Asian girls here, there was one girl in my course, Priya, who is huge now. She has been teaching now and she’s on every festival lineup. She always stood out and every week she would come in and ask so many questions and by week three I thought, “She’s the one.” And now she is. You see how happy it makes someone, and it creates this beautiful little ecosystem of people passing it on.