TRIVIUM frontman Matt Heafy spoke to Forbes about his Twitch channel, which boasts a total viewership of 3.5 million views and a subscriber count of over five thousand. Matt, who streams everything from video games, guitar clinics to TRIVIUM and acoustic song covers, all while he's off the road and awaiting the next TRIVIUM album-tour cycle, explained what exactly led him to pursue this avenue with streaming video games and music-related content on Twitch. "Well, I've always been into video games," he said. "I remember beating 'Mario' before I was really speaking English — my mom is Japanese and she kind of raised me for a little while on her own while my dad was in the marines. So video games were something I was playing before I started playing guitar. I started with the originals like 'Mario' and 'Donkey Kong', kind of building my way up and then I was heavily into RPGs as a preteen to my teenage years with 'Final Fantasy'. 'Final Fantasy IV', 'VI', 'VII' and 'IX' were my favorites, and then I started getting into first person shooters like 'Call Of Duty', but I got into those through 'GoldenEye'. I started watching some streamers and decided I wanted to do it, but I did it kind of half-assed at first, and not that I was being lazy about it, I just didn't really know the right way to do it. "I later befriended two Twitch associates, John Howell and Brandon Kaupert, and they invited me to the Twitch headquarters one day when TRIVIUM was playing San Francisco," he continued. "So I went down and they gave me a tour of the place and they lent me one of the Gunrun backpacks, which I was using to stream the shows with. So I started streaming some shows and it started going pretty good, and then I visited San Francisco and met up with Brandon and John again, and I told them, 'Man, I love Twitch so much I wish I could do it more, but here's why I can't.' And the reason I couldn't is because I have to practice between one to three to five hours a day to keep myself in shape. And Brandon looks at me and says, 'Why don't you just stream that?' I had an 'aha' moment and I was, like, 'Nobody wants to watch that, dude.' And he said, 'Trust me. Just try that.' "So, lo and behold, I've only had one job ever — it's been TRIVIUM; first band, first job — but for the last three years, I'm happy to say Twitch has become a second job. When I'm at home, I make significantly more from Twitch streaming than I do with TRIVIUM, and then when I'm out on tour with TRIVIUM, then obviously TRIVIUM becomes more and twitch becomes less. But the fact that I'm able to make money doing what I should be doing off tour, staying conditioned, practicing, and being ready for a tour at any given moment, it's amazing and we really have a supportive community." TRIVIUM will release its ninth album, "What The Dead Men Say", on April 24 via Roadrunner Records. The LP will be the follow-up to "The Sin And The Sentence", which came out in October 2017. That effort marked the band's first release with drummer Alex Bent, who joined TRIVIUM in 2016. TRIVIUM is scheduled to support MEGADETH and LAMB OF GOD on a 55-date North American tour this summer and fall.
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