Gigging in the gig economy: The labour of live music in a platformed circuit of commerce

Abstract

This article explores how musicians navigate live performance within the digital gig economy by examining creative labour on Twitch. Drawing on economic sociology, we conceptualise livestreamed performance as a distinct circuit of commerce in which artists and audiences negotiate value, intimacy, and exchange in real time. Based on a video analysis of 20 top-rated Twitch music streamers, we identify three interrelated features shaping this circuit. First, performing live on a platform intensifies the demand for relational labour. It becomes central to artistic work as a structural requirement of platform participation, where sustained audience engagement underpins monetisation, visibility, and community stability. Second, monetary transactions are framed as expressions of care and belonging rather than straightforward payment, with musicians managing relational expectations and economic tensions through platform-specific forms of cultural camouflage—that is, by symbolically obscuring overt market activity. Third, Twitch’s platform affordances and audience expectations restructure live musical performance by generating a demand for continuous adjustment, producing contingent cultural commodities that remain flexible in both production and monetisation. Within this market logic, uncertainty—manifest in mistakes, unfinished, and process-based work—becomes not only a creative condition but an economic imperative. By situating Twitch musicians within broader debates on platform labour and cultural production, this article shows how livestreaming extends, but also transforms, existing logics of artistic work. We argue that platforms reorganise circuits of cultural value by rendering precarity economically productive, thereby reconfiguring how artistic labour is enacted in live settings.