Tracy
Chan

The Platform Builder Who Always Worked One Platform Ahead

There's a specific year that keeps showing up in Tracy Chan's biography: 2020. That's when he joined Twitch as Head of Music, just as live venues shut down globally and a generation of musicians needed somewhere to perform. It's also when his daughter started playing a music game on Roblox called Splash. He didn't think much of it at the time. Four years later, he runs it.

Chan is CEO of Splash, the Brisbane-founded, AI-powered music creation platform that has accumulated 480 million plays inside Roblox. The premise is simple and quietly radical: what if every kid on Roblox could be the musician, not just the audience? What if "listening to music" became "performing music" - with AI handling the gap between intent and execution? That's the bet Chan made when he left SoundCloud in March 2024 to take the CEO role.

But to understand why he said yes, you need to trace the thread back further. Chan started at YouTube, where he designed and launched YouTube Insight - the platform's first analytics tool for creators. This was the mid-2000s, when "creator" wasn't yet a job title. He was building dashboards that told artists whether anyone was watching, at a time when most of the industry was still arguing about whether YouTube was a problem or an opportunity.

From YouTube he went to found CrowdAlbum, a social photo-and-video aggregator that stitched together fan-shot content from live concerts into something the industry hadn't seen: a "visual history" of a tour, assembled from the audience's perspective. Angel investors included executives from Spotify, Viacom, HBO, and Universal Music Group. That network says something about what he was already building. Spotify acquired CrowdAlbum in 2016, and Chan walked through the door and immediately started leading Spotify for Artists - the analytics and creator platform that is now used by millions of musicians and labels worldwide.

After four years building creator infrastructure at Spotify, he made a lateral move that looked odd from the outside: Head of Music at Twitch. The reasoning was precise. "One of the things that became very clear to me was that artists and fans wanted to connect with each other," he said. "But Spotify is about listening to music and discovering music - it's a kind of background experience. What attracted me to Twitch was that even though it's game-centric, at the core, it is creators and fans building community." The pandemic made that decision look prescient immediately.

At Twitch, Chan ran music through arguably the most interesting two years the streaming world has ever had. Virtual concerts went from novelty to necessity. Artists who had never considered gaming platforms started streaming live sets. Chan helped build the infrastructure and partnerships that made Twitch a credible live music venue. Rolling Stone named him to its Future 25 list during this period - a list that tracks people shaping the next chapter of the music business.

Then came SoundCloud, where he was Chief Content Officer from June 2022 through early 2024. He oversaw music content, licensing, intelligence, and creator strategy - and launched several products: the Fans tool for artists, mobile direct messaging, a comments feature, and a global licensing deal with Merlin, the independent music licensing group. He built what he'd later describe as "SoundCloud for Artists," a direct echo of what he'd done at Spotify nearly a decade earlier.

The pattern across all of it: Chan builds at the place where creators need information, connection, or tools they don't yet have. He moves between platforms not because he's chasing titles but because each platform had a version of the problem he was interested in solving. The problem is always some variation of: how does an artist find the people who actually care about their work, and how do you build something sustainable from that connection?

Why 480 Million Plays Is the Beginning, Not the Peak

When Chan describes the market opportunity at Splash, he starts with a comparison that the music industry doesn't like to sit with: gaming is eight times larger than music. And the reason isn't that gaming made better content. It's that games are foreground activity, while music - in its current streaming form - is background. "Music is devalued," he's said, "because it is not the core central activity that you're doing."

The Splash thesis is a direct challenge to that dynamic. On Roblox, music isn't something playing behind something else. It's the thing itself. Players sing, rap, perform, and collaborate in an immersive virtual environment where they're also the artist, the audience, and the fan. The platform uses AI trained on music that Splash owns or has licensed - an important distinction that Chan draws repeatedly, and loudly.

The numbers are arresting. Splash's Roblox game averages 3 million plays and 2.8 million performances per month. The cumulative total hit 480 million. For context: most music artists spend their entire careers chasing a streaming milestone that size. Splash hands it to users who never recorded a professional track.

Chan's framework for understanding why: 68% of young people now see themselves as creators. They grew up with mobile phones and social tools that made creation the default mode of engagement. Passive listening was a behavior the industry trained into older generations. The next generation isn't waiting for permission to be artists.