- Earlier this week the new CEO of Twitch, Dan Clancy, took to his own channel for an impromptu performance.
- The former NASA researcher started singing classic songs, including ‘Take me Home, Country Roads.’
- A clip of the performance went viral, amassing close to five million views on Twitter.
Twitch’s new CEO, Daniel Clancy, took over the top job at the company in mid-March following the departure of previous CEO Emmett Shear.
While he’s early on in his CEO tenure at Twitch, there is one thing that has stood out about Clancy this week: he’s got some music chops.
A clip from an impromptu, after-hours Twitch broadcast — Clancy began streaming on May 10 at 7 PM PT, with a keyboard and microphone at his disposal — has gone viral, showing the former NASA researcher singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The video has since amassing close to 5 million views on Twitter alone.
—Dexerto (@Dexerto) May 11, 2023
While the entire livestream is not available to view, Clancy did pin a few clips from the stream to his official channel, DJClancy. In the beginning of his broadcast the CEO fielded questions from participants, before getting into a musical performance at around 10:17 PM PT, per Twitchtracker.
“Welcome, welcome to the raiders,” Clancy says in one clip that is appended to his channel. He was presumably referencing an influx of viewers, as “raiding,” on the platform refers to a scenario when one streamer redirects their live audience to another live streamer’s broadcast.
At its peak, the Twitch stream had 157 concurrent viewers, dropping down to 132 when he began singing songs — during Clancy’s John Denver impression, the stream had fallen to 70 viewers.
In the bottom left-hand corner of the stream, a box display shows that “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” was requested from a Twitch user named “idothingssometines,” as Clancy was fielding song requests at the time.
The clip itself is brief, lasting only 30 seconds, but it managed to garner a reaction online.
“Say what you will about Twitch, this guy is already 100x better than Emmet Shear,” said one Redditor.
“Thought that was Richard Branson for a second,” said another, commenting on Clancy’s long hair.
Twitter users made jokes about Twitch’s copyright rules — in 2020 the Amazon-owned company began scanning clips and removing them if they contained copyrighted material.
“*Twitch’s CEO has been banned due to copyright infringement*,” one user joked in a reply to the now viral video. “DMCA strike incoming,” reads another.
Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 and after Shear’s departure on March 16 of this year, Clancy stepped in as CEO the same day.
Clancy was a researcher at NASA in the late 90s before managing the computational sciences division and then moving into a director role, overseeing information sciences as well as the technology directorate. He would later join Google in 2005 and led the company’s book search project.
More recently, Clancy was the vice president of product and engineering at Nextdoor and joined Twitch in 2019 as the president of Twitch Interactive.
In April, following a round of Amazon layoffs, Clancy expressed his discontent over the decision, citing that he was “disappointed,” to make the announcement before being able to let each affected employee know individually.
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