It has been a while since we covered Twitch. Indeed, the last time we did was in March when, as part of a raft of layoffs at parent company Amazon – and in common with companies across the tech world – it was announced that just over 400 people at Twitch would be losing their jobs. 

The platform, however, is still enormously popular and music companies continue to see the power of reaching the highly engaged audiences there.

Dance label Ministry Of Sound (MOS), part of Sony Music Entertainment, has launched a weekly gaming livestream on Twitch called Beyond The Player. It is sponsored by cosmetics retailer Lush and is hosted by Stephanie Nneoma, the founder of gaming/lifestyle/sports/entertainment company NNESAGA.

A range of musicians were, at launch, confirmed to appear over the coming weeks, including Talia Mar, Sim0ne, VENBEE, Bklava, wAFF and Jordan Adetunji. Streamers including Sunpi, Ebonix and King Jae were also booked to appear.

It began on the MOS Twitch channel on 9th May and the initial run is scheduled for eight consecutive Tuesdays. Among the games the artists and streamers will be playing are The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4 and Final Fantasy 16.

Each episode runs for around 90 minutes and alternates between semi-informal chats and actual gameplay.

At the moment, the numbers are, however, small. The handful of videos released thus far in the run have had views in the hundreds rather than the thousands or tens of thousands. The official MOS channel on Twitch has just 921 followers so this may be a slow build for the label.

It is a hard platform to build a following on as the target audiences are on there a lot and have a multitude of channels vying for their attention.

How this builds over the rest of the run (and if it returns for a second series) is going to be interesting. MOS and Lush are major brands, but it is proof that any brand getting a solid foothold in the world of Twitch is far from a given.