After three years of daily streaming Christchurch artist Veryhandsomebilly Twitched himself off. Not entirely as it turns out but Billy Mills, the artist who goes by that bodacious handle, is now a budding singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist, and fully DIY artist. His recently released ‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’ EP collates five of his 2024 single releases, each inspired by real-life events. Richard Thorne talked with Billy about his process of transformation from sponsored global entertainer to Kiwi solo artist.

There are familiar and very good ways for developing musicians to hone their skills in a time- and cost-effective manner. Frequent gigging as a covers act is a good one, or for the more adventurous signing up as an entertainer for a cruise ship season. At another extreme you could set out to play live to an online audience every day for the next three years, or 1000 days, as this musician did.

Maybe put the jug on and take a while to let that number sink in… it takes some comprehending.

The Christchurch-by-way-of-England singer and multi-instrumentalist who goes by the vaguely ironic name of Veryhandsomebilly says he really just started his Twitch live streaming career because he had quit his real job and wanted something else to do – he’d chosen to learn how to play piano.

“Instead of jumping straight back into the corporate life, and, you know, hating myself for it, I wanted to do a couple of things I’ve always wanted to do. So I picked up a piano and then decided I wanted to record the process of getting better. Twitch actually records all your live streams and you can download them very quickly. It’s almost like a server where you can hold video. So I used that.

“I just started either playing songs everyone knows to strangers on the internet, playing my own stuff, making stuff up – a lot of making stuff up. And (jokingly) it really became a cult, you could say, where people would tune in every single day to be part of this community. And of course it all revolved around playing music and celebrating music, and, you know, enjoying music and being the Twitch performer!”

Best known as a gamers’ live streaming platform, Twitch’s model encourages viewers to donate during the streams, with subscriptions, affiliate programmes and advertising revenue providing additional streamer income.

“I slowly got to know a very small community. And then they said, ‘So you don’t play piano, do you?’ I’m like, ‘No!’ ‘Yeah, what do you play?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I play everything else.’

“They responded, ‘Why don’t you do that?’ So I set some equipment up using software to connect everything, and then instantly people were very, very excited and really enjoyed being there.”

Performing since his teens in Ōtautahi, Billy calculates he’s played close to 1000 shows around the country in the ‘corporate gig/wedding singer’ vein. As a result he has an onboard catalogue of songs everybody knows, even international audiences. He could musically respond to online audience chatter and says people find that to be magic.

For a solo musician he does a lot of drumming, and Billy reckons a key to his online audience development was his multi-instrumental tendencies, like breaking out a saxophone solo mid-song.

“I’m fully a jack of all trades, master of none. But that’s kind of the point! That’s what people enjoyed. It meant that during the process I’d pick up like, the flute and things, random stuff that people thought would be quite funny.

“Eventually I started making original music on stream, as part of these creative challenges I was leading during Covid. I started sharing other people’s creative music. I started helping people. They started helping me, and that made it a larger kind of community.”

His small audience grew to hundreds, then started to blow up into the thousands, even tens of thousands. Timing can be everything for any music career, and Billy acknowledges Covid was the best thing that could have happened to someone with an online community.

“It’s the only place that truly thrived because of the lockdown, because people were stuck inside and they wanted to be entertained.”

Aiding his sublime timing in joining Twitch, a number of influential streamers and others on the platform who perhaps stumbled across his streams, liked what they saw. Uber popular Turkish/American liberal influencer Hasan Piker is one example.

“He was very supportive for a long time which grew my audience further. And then ultimately, one of the final parts of the Twitch puzzle was that I happened to be on an interview talk show –online because it was during Covid – and one of the other guests was T-Pain. We were talking ‘backstage’ in the voice chat beforehand and we got along really well. I did a couple of virtual performances on that talk show using my set up and for some reason he thought I was the best thing ever!

“From that moment onwards he’s been a very, very supportive, he’s been actively helpful to me. Essentially we released a song together just a couple years back [I’m Cool With That], and I think he even managed to get me in the music video, which is quite difficult considering we couldn’t travel during Covid! So that was quite a big, important moment for me – realising, that this very established, well-documented, popular pop artist thinks I’m not that bad.”

A degree of relentless confidence, hubris even, is surely necessary to become a top drawer streaming artist, yet despite his very real success in that world Billy isn’t being self-deprecating, rather well aware that he’s enjoyed a dollop of very good Twitch fortune over the last five years – while pointing out Twitch success isn’t all he aspires to.

“You’re lucky if you make money from live streaming, and I know I got really lucky. In terms of numbers most people talk about followers, and I think I’ve probably got around about 40,000 on Twitch. But the follow account really doesn’t mean much. It’s a good number to throw around, but what is important I think is that I have one million hours of watch time, and that’s quite a substantial number. That was quite an achievement when I got there.

“Another important number is on the peak and average viewership count of these streams on Twitch. Now that I’ve cut back entirely it’s like 100 or 300 people, but at the peak the viewership might have been close to 30,000 at one point. Yeah! So it’s pretty crazy, and it is quite shocking when it does happen and you can’t keep up with the chat that just runs down the screen! It’s quite frightening but you do, you do sadly get used to it.”

He’s something of a word streamer himself, but Billy pauses briefly to consider when asked if that sort of fandom and the immediacy of the live streaming feedback loop becomes addictive.

“That’s a really interesting question… because I’ve known this whole time that Twitch doesn’t scratch the itch of what I want music to be, and it never has. I’ve never been addicted to it. I did it for three years straight, every single day, so you would say that’s addiction, yeah! But it was more, umm, I knew what needed to be done to create a strong community, and it’s to be there every single day, without fail, and be optimistic, be entertaining, and create stories and law almost behind the content you’re creating.

“So there’s a lot of like in-jokes within the community about me as a person, too many to count, most of them quite embarrassing, that kind of thing. And that was really important. You can’t create that unless you’re there, you’ve got to be hands on. And it’s painful, but I always knew the goal wasn’t to do this forever, and I’ve always been waiting to find the right time to kind of step back.”

That time, he says arrived about two years ago now, and during the time since his Twitch community has remained supportive, meaning he has continued doing Twitch events and going to the conventions.

“It’s been a really lovely, kind of comfortable evolution into removing the idea of being a dancing monkey, and then having a really, really supportive fan base that’s accepting of the fact that I’m leaving that behind. And for the last two years I’ve been doing that and instead it’s been about creating what I think is what I should be doing. And it’s been lovely, my Twitch and Patreon supporters have been fantastic.”

The trigger for him to stop Twitch-ing?

“It was when I got to Day 1000 of streaming,” he laughs, implicitly acknowledging just how ridiculously extreme that sounds.

“Yeah, I so it was a good milestone, especially because people knew it was coming, and they knew what my intention was. I said, ‘Look, at day 1000 I’m gonna do one very long stream, which lasts about four days, five days, maybe…’ So at some point I think there were thousands of people watching me sleep!”

Billy’s uncharacteristically almost lost for words himself at that revelation, but insists the videos are online somewhere if you want to watch Veryhandsomebilly sleeping…

“It is weird, but when it comes to streaming that wasn’t an original thing for me to do, a lot of streamers do that as kind of a joke. But, umm, yeah, it got to day 1000 and I said, ‘Look, guys, I cannot be truly creative to myself when I’m putting on a facade, essentially for everyone, every single day. I don’t have the time to feel creative or the energy to work on things I want to work on. So I’m going to step back, and all you’re going to hear from me is I’m going to release stuff every month. It’s going to be videos, it’s going to be my own music, and I might play some music with you.’ And there was absolutely no person within the closer community who had a negative response!”

In fact hundreds still remain subscribed to his Twitch and Patreon accounts, so Billy continues receiving income from people supporting him to develop his solo artist career, some quite generously. He’s confident that he’s the only Kiwi musician to have made a years-long living online in this manner.

“It feels mad, but because those people are that sure I’m doing the right thing it kind of it gives me that incentive to keep doing it, you know? I have to keep going. So I feel incredibly lucky, to the point where I have to not say that every single time I’m talking on Twitch. Pursuing my own music as a career now would be impossible without the support that I got from this community.”

18 months into his new solo career and maintaining that release-a-month promise in October he released an EP titled ‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’ – a follow up to the 5-song ‘I Know Girls’ EP also date stamped 2024. Each are compilations of singles, though he describes the earlier EP as kind of a tester to give himself a measure of where he was at, saying it was heavily themed aesthetically just for fun.

“I dressed up very ‘70s. There’s lots of like videos and silly things online of me looking like… essentially looking like Tom Jones, if he but washed out, even more washed up! That was the intention. Because I love Tom Jones, but I like the idea of maybe portraying myself as a failed ‘70s singer trying to make a bit of a comeback. That was kind of the vibe, and you can hide behind that kind of jokiness a little bit as an artist. So that was a bit of a joke, but some of the songs went pretty well.”

Vintage Tom Jones-styled maybe, but he claims an aversion to the idea of writing any kind of standard love song. Moving on to his ‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’ EP Billy says he wanted to get more real – not full emotional exposure but somewhere more down the middle.

“The songs on this EP are still from external inspiration, but then I’m kind of peppering in my own experience. From the start all five songs were going to be things that people do that are bad… and about relationships. Everything’s about love in the end, isn’t it?” he grins in admission.

“Everyone sings about love all the time – because it is a very strong emotion, and it is part of every other emotion – but the better you can hide it, the more I like it!”

‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’, is a word play on the relationship movement badged ethical non-monogamy; consentually having multiple romantic and sexual relationships.

“Essentially it’s polyamory for young people, yeah, and everyone has an opinion about it! The whole EP is about people doing bad things in their relationships – so ‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’. “Some people get it and some people have no idea, and that’s what I like about it. Each single is about an act that I’ve seen someone else do, but then I’ve extrapolated on, sometimes heavily, and then injected my own experiences of maybe doing similar kind of things. It makes it easier to actually sing it, to even say it, because it feels like it’s authentic. It was quite fun to kind of point the finger at someone and say, ‘You’re bad for these reasons. I’m going to sing about it and be really quite rude.’”

He began working on the ‘Non-Ethical Monogamy’ songs in early 2024, writing songs at a pace that allowed him to record, master, release and market a single each month.

“That was my goal for this year. It was my main thing, so I put a lot of time into it the past nine months. Apart from a final mix down for mastering I do everything, every single part of it. I record here, I write obviously, I play every single instrument. Because of the huge amount of support I got through Twitch I have a fantastic recording suite and stage in my own house. So it’s all there, and I can turn it all on with a switch of remote control button.”

One of the very few people he listens to regarding artistic and mechanical ideas is fellow Christchurch musician Emily C Browning, a friend who also stars in the video of his EP’s key single Vulture and is credited in several others.

“I’ve known Emily for years, and I personally think she’s the best songwriter that I know. The style of music that she makes is certainly not what I make at all, there’s very little connection there, but we’ve helped each other in the past with quite a few things like that, and it’s invaluable.”

No matter the lyrical subject he wants his music to be uplifting, whether that’s with energy or positivity – feeling or meaning as he describes it.

“I don’t want to make music that can be on in the background, and that’s why at the moment it’s leaning towards rock, because it’s guitars and the guitar player. But I have made a decision to be a musician or an artist, and the job of an artist is to make things and I’m not going to pretend to kind of think that I’ve got the next best thing. To an extent my plan of releasing 12 songs this year is just like releasing an album every year, but it’s giving myself a strict timeline.”

With a marketing background he understands the need to spend a bit of money on behind the scenes marketing stuff, but already Veryhandsomebilly can see his Spotify audience growing and reckons it will in time reach a similar kind of level of interaction as Twitch – if he’s lucky. And he’s clearly very good at making his own luck.

“But once again, that’s not the point. The point is I am I releasing music constantly, and I’m proud of it. So far, so good!”