T-Pain's Twitch Rant Has Some Cold Hard Truth To It

Grammy award-winning rapper T-Pain had an amusing rant on Twitch expressing frustration regarding his relatively small audience compared to Twitch's biggest stars. While T-Pain's outburst may come from a place of humor, it does speak truth to the struggles that many new streamers face when trying to grow their audience on Twitch and other streaming platforms.

T-Pain's comments were inspired by a debate as to whether the artist qualified as a small streamer. After all, T-Pain's channel has been live since 2014, is covered by major news outlets such as Newsweek, and has over 480,000 subscribers. While the barrier to begin streaming is low, Twitch is a notoriously tricky streaming community for new streamers to break into. Some streamers have spent years streaming to few or no viewers without gaining anything near T-Pain's following.

However, T-Pain asserts he and other smaller streamers' audiences are in an entirely different bracket than Twitch's most popular content producers. The first streamer T-Pain aims at is the always controversial xQc. T-Pain says, "xQc just did 90,000 views on a Just Chatting and I'm not a small streamer?" He turns his attention to Mizkif's recently dormant channel, stating, "Mizkif ain't been on his stream in ten days, [and receives] a constant 8,000 views! [Viewers are] sitting there, playing Pokémon, without him even being there!"

Finally, T-Pain turns his attention to TimTheTatman, pointing out the streamer's habit of beginning his daily streams on an early schedule. T-Pain grabs his microphone to emphasize as he shouts, "TimTheTatman streams at [expletive] seven AM in the [expletive] morning! TimTheTatman streams before any of us wakes up and he still gets 38,000 people in the first 30 minutes!" This isn't the first time that TimTheTatman has been in T-Pain's sights, however, as the rapper has mentioned his early streaming and positive eating habits before. TimTheTatman may start streaming too early for T-Pain, but Tim's dedication and the consistency of that schedule is one of the things that have helped him establish a community of nearly 6 million followers.

While a recording of an internationally famous musician like T-Pain ranting about his popularity on Twitch is undoubtedly amusing, it does offer some insight into the difficulties of streaming at every end of the spectrum. The obstacle of gaining momentum and building followers has led streamers to create "follow4follow" groups to try and place the building blocks of a Twitch community. However, on the other side, many new streamers have acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining a regular streaming schedule.