Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.
ARIatHOME loves making music.
Especially while he’s walking down the street in New York City or Los Angeles or London with a 55-pound production kit strapped to his body.
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He grew up in a musical family, so when he decided to take some time off from college, where he was earning a lit degree, and start streaming music full-time on Twitch, his parents were “uncharacteristically encouraging” compared to other parents, he says. He knew he wanted to write songs, but he was also struggling with the creative process.
“I would be very passionate about music, but I would be putting 30 or 40 hours into a song and feel miserable and exhausted through the process,” he says.
So, he wanted to try a new approach: He would go live and compose entire songs on the fly, from bass beat to vocals. He put an “insane amount” of time into his streams, staying live and writing entire albums’ worth of music in eight or nine hours, right there in front of the entire internet. Some people might find the vulnerability of that process intimidating, but for Ari, it was a way to cut loose and learn to embrace creative decisions made on the fly.
“You’re still making music and expressing yourself, but every single decision that you make, you have to commit to permanently,” he says. “If you make a bass line and you don’t love it, you’re stuck with it, at least for the next 5 to 10 minutes. I think streaming is just an extension of that.”
A lot of his early growth came from those grueling eight- and nine-hour streams, but now, Ari’s bringing in traffic by pioneering the “IRL music streamer” niche, he says. Over the last year, he’s been building his IRL streaming backpack, which includes a keyboard, mic, headphones, and sound mixing equipment. That all gets rigged to his body, and then he goes out on the street and just…plays, with a friend holding a camera that streams the whole thing to Twitch.
Doing these IRL streams is “a million times more pressure” than streaming, he says, “but I do think I’m getting my hours in for live performance, which is good because through my stuff on Twitch, I’ve gotten booked for some real-life gigs, and whenever I appear at them, I realized that I haven’t really been honing the muscles required for those. I’m not used to engaging an actual present audience where they’re actually there looking at me.”
Between his early boom and his new era of IRL streams, Ari has pulled in nearly 100,000 followers on Twitch. For 2024, he’s setting his sights on expanding to TikTok, and–even more importantly–doing “crazier shit with this backpack” to put more music into the world.
Check out our chat with him below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Very nice to meet you! I’m excited to chat. We’ve spoken to a mix of different genres of streamers, but you’re one of the first live music streamers I’ve spoken to, and certainly the first to do live music the way you do.
ARIatHOME: Oh, dope. Yes.
Tubefilter: I’d like to start with, imagine somebody is reading this and they’ve never encountered you in the wild. They don’t know who you are. Give me a little bit of background about you, where you’re from, and how you got into music.
ARIatHOME: So I stream improvised music. I basically, every time that I go live, I’ll just try to make up as many songs as fast as possible. Like cranking out an album on the spot. I started in my room. I would stream for like seven, eight hours, just making 30 or 35 songs back to back. Just making the instrumental up and then coming up with hooks, coming up with verses, and usually feeding off of the chat interaction. Getting punchlines from chat or getting topic suggestions or even taking actual audio samples from them.
Then within the past year, I’ve been building a mobile rig to be able to do all of that stuff while I walk around outside. I now have this backpack with a wearable desk in the front where my keyboard and my looper goes. I have these speakers in the back and my computer and batteries. Then I just walk around in the street doing the real-life version of that. I’ll try to get strangers to come and rap with me or have them give me sounds or try to get them to dance or do something interesting. I’m now like an “IRL music streamer,” is the new space I’m trying to cut out for myself a little bit. I’m from– Wait, there were other parts of that question, I think.
Tubefilter: Yes. [laughs] Where are you from originally?
ARIatHOME: I’m from New York. I grew up in upstate New York. I have been living in New York City. This past year, I’ve been bopping around a lot more. I’ve been going back and forth to London. Then I’ve been doing not real tours, but I’ll find myself in different states so that I can bring this rig just to different locations. I’m a bit less tethered to a place since about May or June, but New York is definitely my home base. I’m in LA right now, my next stop I’m going to be in New York, so I’m hyped for that.
Tubefilter: How do you like LA?
ARIatHOME: Through Twitch, I know so many people here. I definitely do feel like there’s a lot fewer streamers in New York, so it is nice to come to a place where it feels like there’s so many people I can kick it with that I only have known on the internet and they are real, it turns out. They all live here. I’ll go to a party and there’s 30 people that I’ve known and been friendly with and communicated with on Twitch for years, and they’re all in one spot. That part of it is cool.
Tubefilter: How did you get into music?
ARIatHOME: I have a music family. My dad works in the orchestral world, as does my brother. When we were growing up, we all played piano and a string instrument of our choice. I got into music production on my own. Everyone in my family is pretty musical, and I think uncharacteristically encouraging of music, because that’s what my dad does for a job. They were definitely always encouraging. Although my path is, for sure, quite different from everyone there. I taught myself all of the production stuff I know, for the most part, but they’re super encouraging. My dad still watches a bunch of my streams and he’ll be in the chat roasting me if I say anything naughty.
Tubefilter: That’s very cool. I am really curious about your approach to streaming and music, because it seems like a lot of creative vulnerability to be like, “I’m going to make 30 songs on stream right now.” I’m a writer and it would intimidate the hell out of me to write in front of people.
ARIatHOME: Actually, that’s funny you say that because I think my streaming is a direct response to what you’re describing. I majored in literature, so I have a bit of a writing background too. I like to think that I’m a okay or pretty good writer, but I get super paralyzed by projects and deadlines. I would always push things off until the last moment possible or be freaking out and anxious about it the whole time. I always would have decision paralysis and it would make every single project so much harder than it needed to be. I had the same thing with music.
I would be very passionate about music, but I would be putting 30 or 40 hours into a song and feel miserable and exhausted through the process. It’s what got me into improvisation in the first place, because I liked the notion of, it’s a similar setting. You’re still doing creative work. You’re still making music and expressing yourself, but every single decision that you make, you have to commit to permanently. If you make a bass line and you don’t love it, you’re stuck with it, at least for the next 5 to 10 minutes. I think streaming is just an extension of that. It’s just, you’re stuck with it, and now there’s an audience and they’re listening to it.
This happens to me all the time where I’ll make a song and I don’t really love the song. I think it’s not good. Then people will clip it and then it exists on the internet forever and people will listen to it. Probably they like it more than I do. I just have to live and be comfortable with the artistic decisions that I’ve made on the fly. Definitely first coming into it was pretty stressful, but as time has gone by, it feels very liberating because it’s actually, it’s taken so much stress off me that I think I had before I got in the livestreaming improv world.
To me, livestreaming and improvisational creation are super intertwined. Even the most, I don’t know, content creator gamer people, they’re doing improv. They’re coming up with jokes on the fly. They’re coming up with bits. Anytime that they have a collab, they have to have interesting creative rapport. It’s just as forms of media go, I think live streaming is pretty unique because you just always have to commit to whatever decision you’re making while it’s happening.
Tubefilter: Which is terrifying. At least for me.
ARIatHOME: Which is terrifying. That is true. It is terrifying. I don’t know, but it’s also very freeing. I found when I’ve had gigs where I have something pre-planned, I get so much more stressed and I usually end up messing it up way more than I would if I just pulled up with nothing prepared and just go for it. For me, it’s gotten rid of a lot of my performance and creative-related anxiety. I don’t know. [laughs] Maybe you should start streaming your writing.
Tubefilter: [laughs] I think you’re just built different, man.
ARIatHOME: Maybe. I do have the flip side of it, though, which is since I’ve gotten so deep into streaming, I’ve done less non-improv work, when I want to do both. I want to get back to that a little, and it’s hard going back to a non-improvised field when now it’s just so easy for me to just, I turn on my machine and then boom, let’s go. The process to a note, I don’t know what you would call that, to a fully produced song is so different now from what I’ve been doing for two or three years that, I don’t know. That’s a hard thing to get myself back into.
Tubefilter: I understand.
ARIatHOME: I’ll get there.
Tubefilter: Does it feel any different doing your IRL streams? Is it that same sort of good pressure? Is it better? Is it worse?
ARIatHOME: It’s more pressure for sure. It’s physically harder. It’s sort of like, I’m already in hard mode by virtue of, if I have a big audience and I have no plan, that’s daunting–or it can be. Then outside, I am more nerfed. For instance, because I have speakers and I’m not in a studio setting, I have a live mic instead of a studio condenser. The vocals sound worse. I sound less sexy, like, I’m carrying 55 pounds on my body. It’s physically more difficult to play the notes and sing the notes that I would normally have an easy time with.
My fingers are in a different position and now there’s real people looking at me. At least on the internet, there are people watching you, but you can close your eyes and pretend they’re not there. They can’t get you in the same way. If you’re having a bad day, you can just turn it off and they won’t see you anymore, versus outside, you’re really out there. It’s like when I’m making something and I am not really rocking with it and there’s actual people and because it’s not a show, they’re all strangers. All of them are seeing me for the first time and they’re staring at me, that is super daunting.
It’s a million times more pressure, but I do think I’m getting my hours in for live performance, which is good because through my stuff on Twitch, I’ve gotten booked for some real-life gigs, and whenever I appear at them, I realized that I haven’t really been honing the muscles required for those. I’m not used to engaging an actual present audience where they’re actually there looking at me. It’s terrifying, but it’s getting me a lot more comfortable with things outside of my comfort zone, which is ultimately a huge positive, I think.
Tubefilter: I know you stream very frequently, what’s your average week look like in terms of balancing streams where you’re at home, streams where you’re out or you’re traveling?
Tubefilter: Things are a little weird right now because I’m traveling. I don’t have a desktop. I don’t have my desktop setup anywhere near me. When I travel, I just try to use this rig every day. I don’t know if this is my regular lifestyle. This has been how I’ve been living for like a month now, and probably another month. I try to go outside for a few hours with this every day. If I can’t, if there’s rain, or– I need at least one person to walk with me too. If I can’t get that, then I just try to figure out a way to run a stream from inside.
I’m not really trying to do traditional desktop stream. If I do something inside, I try to figure out a way to make it a little weirder, more interesting. Like we threw a very impromptu party two days ago with like, 15 people. Then I was just making my music in front of them. Then when I was in Austin, we did some hot tub streams. I was staying with someone that had a hot tub. I just put my gear on the side of the hot tub and chilled in the hot tub making beats. Those are the desktop version. I’m just trying to put this backpack on me every day if I can.
I’m just hitting up friends and trying to get them to let me stay on their couch. Then every day I hit up people to try to get them to walk with me. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s safe for me to do this on my own, because once I put my headphones on, I don’t have as great a sense of what’s actually going on around me in the real world. If a car honks at me, I might not hear it. I try to have a buddy or two with me.
Tubefilter: Seems very safe. Seems like a smart policy.
ARIatHOME: Yes, I haven’t been attacked yet.
Tubefilter: That’s good.
ARIatHOME: It may happen, but hopefully not. I think music at least is good. People, it seems to be pretty agreeable. Even if I’m making something that I’m like, “I don’t know if I’m loving how this sounds,” people will still dance to it in the real world, which is cool.
Tubefilter: Hell yeah. Are you on Spotify?
ARIatHOME: Not really officially. I have, my main mod cuts up improvs and puts them on Spotify, but it’s his account that he runs. It’s more for our community to be able to listen back to improvs. For me personally, I don’t really listen back to my own stuff outside of the context of the stream, because to me, it’s improv, so it’s live. When it’s not live, I’m not sure it’s as legible as a real song. He does make really good cuts of them and stuff. He’s got four or five albums’ worth of material he’s just cut up, which is pretty cool.
Tubefilter: Okay, that answers– I was curious about whether you preserve any songs or turn them into full-produced songs.
ARIatHOME: Yes. I probably should, down the line, but for me, it’s just like, I would always prefer to make a new one then refine an old one, which eventually I probably should refine some as well. I don’t know. Right now I’m still in my improv world.
Tubefilter: Any other cool plans? I know you said you want to travel more. Any other cool plans or projects you’re working on right now?
ARIatHOME: I’m just trying to figure out how to do crazier shit with this backpack, to be honest. More people, more weirder stuff. If I can go paragliding or something, that would be cool. I don’t really know. It can exist in a lot of contexts and settings, whereas before my music setup was just trapped in my room. I’m just trying to think of how far I can stretch the limit of where I can take it or put it and make music. I guess my goal and probably make some TikToks. I got to figure out how to make some TikToks too.
Tubefilter: Oh, yes. You’re going to do the TikTok thing?
ARIatHOME: I guess. I don’t know. We all have to do the TikTok thing, right? We all have to. I don’t know if we want to, but we have to.
Tubefilter: Actually, I would love to get into that a little bit before we part ways. A lot of the other streamers I’ve spoken to have turned to TikTok and YouTube because of Twitch’s relative lack of discoverability.
ARIatHOME: Yes. They do not have that figured out at all.
Tubefilter: You’ve grown a decent following on Twitch and now you’re thinking about getting into TikTok, so I’d like to hear about your experience with discoverability. How do you think it works on Twitch?
ARIatHOME: Growth is really hard. When you’re starting out, the thing you have to do is figure out a way to make your stream compelling enough to retain new viewers, but then you just have to put an insane amount of hours on the board, which is what makes music stream so hard because most musicians are not trying to stream for more than a few hours. The reason that I started to gain more traction is because I took a year off from school and then I would just regularly do eight- or nine-hour-long music streams four or five times a week, which is insane.
I don’t do that currently. Doing that just meant that because I was online all the time. Because no one ever sees you if you’re not online. That meant that some slightly bigger or even few much bigger people would find me and raid me, but it was a very slow growth. Then over time, I guess you start to make connections with bigger Twitch people and then you can do, I don’t know, collaborations with them and stuff, but it’s a slow grind for sure. My growth slowed down a lot until I started making this thing because I was just trying to figure out a way to create a stream format that could be digestible to non-music people too.
I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the more traditional desktop music streams, but the people that watch those are usually, they’re either huge music fans or music producers themselves. It’s a pretty small niche. If you’re not super obsessed with the music, you’re not going to tune in versus now I try to make the streams crazier and make more stuff happen in them so that anyone can watch it. If they click in, they’ll stick around. I don’t know. I don’t really know if I have a great answer. I’m still figuring that out.
I’m not huge or anything, by my understanding. On Twitch, it’s just hours. On Twitch, you just have to put in an insane amount of time, versus on TikTok. I think you’re incentivized to be more strategic about the content you put out. Even if you’re making a TikTok a day, that’s so much less of a time commitment than streaming every day, I think. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out how to grow, to be honest. I’m still studying. I’m still trying to figure it out.
Twitch does some stuff. I know they, especially music streamers, I think they’ve gone out of their way to promote. They have a front page program where you get shown to people. I don’t know. I get the sense that they also want to figure out more reliable, stable discovery.
Tubefilter: Agreed. That’s the vibe I’ve gotten. Especially with the new CEO; he’s really speaking to people and going on their streams.
ARIatHOME: Yes. His willingness to collaborate with anyone is pretty cool. It’s something I take to heart that I’ve tried to do as well. Most of the people I collaborate with these days are not musicians at all. They super are going out of their comfort zones to accompany me on my walks. That’s what you’ve got to do. You got to figure out how to be cool with as many people as possible. I feel like he’s doing a version of that, which is pretty unique to see a CEO do that, for sure.
