News broke last week that WWE has instituted a controversial new policy where all WWE wrestlers must turn their third-party accounts — namely Twitch — over to the WWE so the company can receive a portion of the revenue going forward. AJ Styles, one of the more prominent wrestlers on Twitch with 39,000 followers, addressed the situation on his stream earlier this week.
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“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Styles said (h/t Wrestling Inc.). “I don’t know what they expect from us when it comes to our channel. I don’t know if it’s something that they’re like, ‘We just want you guys under an umbrella like a WWE Twitch and have a set lineup and here is who is on when’. If that’s the case – great! Then fans would know where and when to find us. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I literally don’t know and unfortunately I found out the same way a lot of you did — through the internet, which is a shame. You’d think it’d be better than that. For guys who are on here trying to, not only work for WWE, but get on here and Twitch and stuff like that, you’d think it’d be a lot easier to communicate with us and us alone instead of whoever it is behind the scenes and them going to Joe Blow and them having more information than us. Is anything set in stone? I don’t think anything is. I think it’s going to come down to communication.”
He later added — “We don’t get to see you; we don’t get to talk to you; we don’t get to do much. This is the next best thing. I don’t know what they’re hoping to get out of this. The communication has not been as great as we’d like. There’s a lot of us who are all on the same page – we’ve talked to each other. We’re facing the same thing. It’s all doom and gloom or, ‘Oh, that’s all they want.’ I feel like this is an opportunity for me and my channel to say, ‘This is what’s really going on’ and debunk some stupid rumors that are going on.”
Styles also addressed the backlash to the policy and his status as an independent contractor, saying that “WWE is a great place to work” before downplaying the idea of someone changing WWE’s policy about its wrestlers not being employees.
“Although, we have all these rules that we have to follow as if we are not independent contractors,” Styles said. “That’s a whole other can that you don’t even want to open up, trust me. I don’t want anyone else to open it up, to be honest with you. I know what’s expected of me and I’d rather keep it that way. We just need to know exactly what they want when it comes to — we need to figure out what is needed of us when it comes to our platforms. It seems like a roundabout way to tell you I don’t know what’s going on.”
