Twitch addresses ‘Music-Related Copyright Claims’ for Live Streams

Streaming platform Twitch have addressed takedowns and copyright claims on their platform in a new Blog post on their platform.

They said “Creators, we hear you. Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can–and should–be better for creators than they have been recently, and this post outlines our next steps to get there. Moving forward, we’ll be more transparent with what’s happening and what tools and resources we’re building to help. Copyright law and the DMCA are not small or simple topics, so this won’t be a brief post. We’ll do our best to keep the legalese to a minimum, though there’s bound to be technical terms here and there.”

Since the beginning of Lockdown, Twitch has been one of the DJ’s preferred Live Streaming platform as twitch music detection software was behind that of Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. This lead to fewer takedowns of streams, which meant longer streaming with bigger tracks for DJs.

Takedowns happen because the DJ doesn’t own the rights to play the track on a Livestream, usually when the DJ plays in a club or Festival, the venue will hold the correct music licences and have to pay royalties for performance of music. Most social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitch have software to detect what music is being played and allow the label to remove that music.

Twitch says “Until May of this year, streamers received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year on Twitch. Beginning in May, however, representatives for the major record labels started sending thousands of DMCA notifications each week that targeted creators’ archives, mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old Clips. We continue to receive large batches of notifications, and we don’t expect that to slow down. 

This means two things: 1) if you play recorded music on your stream, you need to stop doing that and 2) if you haven’t already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might. “

This isn’t great news for DJs wanting to go live unless you are playing unreleased music or you own the label with the music you are playing. Twitch say in the post “Most importantly, don’t play recorded music in your stream unless you own all rights in the music”

The final option is to move your streams to Mixcloud Live – where there are no takedowns because they have the right license and pay the artists for streams on their platform.

You can read their whole post here.