As a fan of underground electronic music, the music producer, Twitch streamer, and label owner Chris Reed, who goes by the stage name Plastician, was used to going the extra mile to catch a show.
“I literally used to have to climb through tower block building windows and hide from the police.” Today, he’s a DJ and runs a music label called Terrorhythm. He goes on, “This is like nothing compared to the shit we've had to put up with before. A lot of us have been through shit like this in the past.”
The shit in question is his and other DJs’ ongoing struggle with the DMCA. While Plastician no longer finds himself climbing through windows or ducking the police, he navigates a more abstract, virtual obstacle course: Twitch.
As Twitch grew, so did the diversity of content. Initially a site dominated by video game streamers, in 2015, the website created a new category of content called Creative and IRL. Then, by 2018, the company announced that this category had “exploded in growth,” and as a result, it created a new category for music.
For Dave Eckblad and many other DJs, Twitch became a way to maintain their local music scene during the coronavirus pandemic. Before the pandemic, he worked in music promotion and co-owned a record store. Now, he produces the Twitch stream for the Minneapolis-based music collective Intellephunk.
