There’s a lot to talk about here. Sometimes something comes up that I have a lot of thoughts and questions about. My brain has trouble letting go of them until they’re out or answered.
If you’re a viewer of my Twitch stream you probably saw me rant for near an hour about this recently. No doubt I babbled a bit so I wanted to try and organise my thoughts a little better. Maybe some of what I say here will help others understand some things too.
A quick warning/disclaimer – Some places below will be purely speculation on my part about how some things work. I will be sure to identify when I’m just kinda making it up and assuming things.
This is pretty long, so here’s some tl;dr links for you to jump to some different spots.
THE BIG BAD MUSIC INDUSTRY
• What is Copyright?
• What is a Rights Collection Agency?
• But How Does That Help Bands?
OK BUT WHAT ABOUT TWITCH?
• Muted VODs on Twitch
• Live Take Downs
• Hey Salt, Spectulate On It!
I THOUGHT THIS WAS ABOUT THE DJ PROGRAM?
• What About the Rest of Us?
• Like Who?
• Moving Forward
• What’s Stopping Them?
CONCLUSION
THE BIG BAD MUSIC INDUSTRY
Let’s start off by talking about this. Whenever people talk about Copyright and the Music Industry I feel like there’s an instant crackle of negative electricity in the air.
When you talk about the Music Industry you are invariably talking about some massive players like Universal Music Group (UMI), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Warner Music Group (WMG). Let’s call the guys at that level the Big Bad Wolves, the ones who put fear into every content creator. You will often see them issuing DMCA takedowns, having YouTube videos demonetised or unavailable in certain countries. All the stuff that makes being a content creator hard.
BUT, the Music Industry also includes every struggling singer/songwriter you’ve never heard of. Your mates metal band from high school. Some kid dropping banger tracks out of his bedroom in some European city you can’t even pronounce. Most of these people don’t have the gigantic power and influence of the Big Bad Wolves, and rely on their own efforts to get their music out to the world. They also rely on Copyright and Rights Collection Agencies to help protect their art and make sure they can be compensated for it. Before we go on, let’s also just have a quick side quest here…
WHAT IS COPYRIGHT?
People like to throw the word Copyright around like it’s a singular thing that’s there just to screw them over. When in fact “Copyright” is actually a collection of rights that exist to protect the intellectual property (IP) of those who create things like art, music, photography, writing etc.
Different countries have their own versions of The Copyright Act. In Australia there’s The Copyright act (1968), the USA has The Copyright Act (1976) and the UK has The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988). Regardless of where the Acts exist they all serve the same purpose, which is to protect the rights of the authors/creators of creative works.
Copyright gives the owner of works the rights to Perform, distribute, reproduce, transcribe and synchronise their works as well as protecting some moral rights of the author. Copyright isn’t just a one trick pony to screw over your YouTube video or get your Twitch VOD muted.
Also, for the record. You do not have to register a Copyright. Once something is published in some sort of form, written down, recorded, however it’s put into tangible form, it is automatically protected by Copyright law. Also the Berne Convention is in place to ensure that rights holders of Copyright originating in one country are covered by the same protection in other countries who are signed onto the Convention.
WHAT IS A RIGHTS COLLECTION AGENCY?
We’re talking specifically about the Music Industry here when I’m talking about Rights Collection Agencies. Essentially in any market where Copyright Law exists and people are protected and owed financial reward for the public performance of their musical work there exists Rights Collection Agencies. These groups issue licences to entities that allow copyrighted music to be played to the public. Because remember, Copyright includes protection for the rights holder in regards to the performance of their works.
Some examples of this – If you are in a supermarket, and the supermarket has speakers in the ceiling playing the radio, that supermarket is required to have a licence to play that copyrighted music to their customers (the public). If you are at a bar and a band is playing live, that bar is required to have a similar licence, as they are allowing music to be performed live as well as playing music generally in the bar. Both of these instances are public consumption of the music and therefore covered by Copyright laws. The radio station mentioned being played in the supermarket earlier? Also needs to have a licence to broadcast the music they put out over the airwaves.
So you can identify some of the players in this Performance Rights Collection Agency space, in Australia we have APRA/AMCOS, in the US there is ASCAP, BMI and others and the UK has PPL.
BUT HOW DOES THAT HELP BANDS?
The Rights Collection agencies take all of that licence money they receive, generally take out whatever it costs to run the organisation, and the rest of it is paid back to the owners of the Copyright of all that music. Now in a huge majority of those cases, that is paid directly to The Big Bad Wolves who own the Copyright in pretty much every song you hear on the radio either directly or through the publishing arm of their business.
BUT your mate’s metal band who plays once a month at the Fuck Bunker, if they have their music registered with their country’s Rights Collection Agency they can submit what they play at each gig, and when it comes around to divide up the big kitty of collected licence money, they’ll get some of that.
The Fuck Bunker performances may likely only get them cents per play, but if a local radio station picks up on one of their tracks and plays it they’ll get a little more. If a national radio station plays it, there can be a decent chunk of change coming their way. Bands if you’re reading this? Get your music registered with an agency and submit your performance records!
OK BUT WHAT ABOUT TWITCH?
So Twitch exists in a space that is unique because it is a global meeting place for creators and the majority of people who stream there like to have music as part of their stream in one way or another. Over the years the relationship between using music and Twitch has been a rocky one.
Back in 2020 there was a massive influx of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998) takedown requests from The Big Bad Wolves which sent the streaming world into a tail spin. The advice at the time from Twitch was that they deleted a load of clips and scared a lot of creators into mass deleting all of their content and basically wipe out the archive of everything fun that’s ever happened on their stream. Which was pretty shitty.
Then came Soundtrack by Twitch, which was basically a failed attempt at putting something in place to help streamers use music on their streams. It was mostly garbage, had hardly any decent music on it and vanished as fast as it arrived. What it did bring around though was the concept of running music on your stream, but not to your VOD recording.
MUTED VODS ON TWITCH
I often hear people talk about being DMCA’d on Twitch when their VOD gets muted if copyrighted music is detected. That’s a misconception and one worth giving Twitch some credit for. They actually introduced a system to detect copyrighted music in VODs and mute it, so when the DMCA hunter killer bots come scanning over your content they don’t sniff out that clip of Taylor Swift you bust some moves to on a whim and slap you with an ACTUAL DMCA takedown. Twitch is trying to protect you with that measure, it should be celebrated.
LIVE TAKE DOWNS
OK so this is where I’m getting a little speculative. While most people who just decided to roll the dice with playing whatever they wanted and use the technical set up to not send music to your VOD track (PS if you want to know how, here’s a video explaining it) there is this ongoing discussion about the dreaded LIVE TAKE DOWN! Where a streamer will be given a DMCA strike while live and have their channel taken down.
This happened at Sea of Thieves event SoTFest last year or the year before when The Longest Johns were performing at the event. The Twitch stream of the event was presumably given a Copyright strike while it was live and taken down. I have a theory of why this happens. If anyone knows the actual mechanics behind it, please let me know.
HEY SALT, SPECULATE ON IT!
I think the concept of a “live take down” is actually a misnomer and what is actually happening is the system that detects music on a stream is actually detecting the music in the VOD as it is being recorded. If you automatically publish your VODs, while you’re live, people can go back and watch your VOD before you even finish the stream. My speculation here is that unless you are actively NOT sending music to your VOD, the music in the partially recorded VOD is actually susceptible to being picked up by the system searching for copyrighted music.
Now whether the SoTFest channel was actually DMCA struck or just taken offline by Twitch because it detected the music and it was an automated response, I’m unsure. But my best guess is it wasn’t pinged because of the music being played live in that instant, but the music that was being recorded in the VOD in the minutes preceding that. So while it is technically a live take down, I don’t think it was because of the live content.
If anyone knows anyone who’s been taken down for playing music and they DEFINITELY had it turned off from their VOD channel let me know.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS ABOUT THE DJ PROGRAM?
Oh yeah. OK so Twitch have announced that they have come to an agreement with the Music Industry in regards to the use of music on Twitch. Oh great Salt, you mean all music usage on Twitch? Oh no of course not haha! What do you think this would be easy?
No, this is specifically just aimed at people who do DJ sets on Twitch. How it works is basically you register yourself to be part of the Twitch DJ Program and you’re whisked away to a magical world where you can no longer save VODs, clips, highlights or any type of recording of your stream. The reasoning behind this I assume (here’s me speculating) is that the licence covers live broadcasting of the content but not RE-broadcasting of the content. Clips and VODs would be considered a re-broadcast.
You also agree to Twitch taking an (as of right now) unknown percentage of your stream income to pay to the Rights Collection Agency or body that they have entered into this agreement with. The purpose of this being to give back to the copyright holders. Other than nobody knowing how much of the Twitch income will be taken, this is actually an excellent outcome and a step in the right direction.
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?
Well. Twitch have released an updated bunch of information on how they will be handling reports of copyrighted music being detected by rights holders. They seem to have put this agreement in place to be a buffer between them and the actual DMCA so that rather than things going directly to Copyright strikes, they will be handling things a little more flexibly.
You can read the updated policy on Music Reporting here at this link where you will see it is broken down into how reports will be handled for DJ channels (in the program) and other channels (not in the program). My gripe here is that it only seems to be music focussed streams. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of indication on how this change will work for streamers who don’t focus on music but like to have it as part of their stream.
LIKE WHO?
I’m one of those streamers. I stream art. The focus of my stream is art that I create. But watching me draw for four hours with only the sound of my ranting voice and heavy concentrated breathing sounds isn’t that fun. So I play music and do that fancy trick where I send no music to my VOD. I’ve also added anything I play on YouTube to that non-VOD track to be safe. But having silent VODs isn’t really a big deal for me, because the art is the focus of my stream.
Almost every streamer I watch is a non-music focussed stream. People cranking 90s in Fortnite, snapping up nerds in Sea of Thieves and the many many artist streamers I love to hang out with all in some way or another include music in their streams. The difference is if they end up using generic royalty free music, or sign up to somewhere like Epidemic Sounds to play their sound-alike licenced music.
It’s important to note that while there are tricks to get around having music on your VOD, even the use of music in the live original broadcast is technically not permitted on Twitch. So Copyright is 100% being breeched here, it’s just seemingly being policed heavily, and once the stream is over, the VOD shows no evidence of it happening.
So it’s somewhat deceitful, but it’s all we’ve got right now. Remember back here when I was talking about how the rights to how their music is broadcast belongs to the author of the work or those representing them? That still applies to Twitch, and there’s no licence in place for the rest of us. So we’re still technically ripping some musicians off.
MOVING FORWARD
I’d like to think that if the percentage isn’t an absolute price gouge of streamer income and is a reasonable amount, that this kind of arrangement could be rolled out to the entirety of Twitch. I know personally that if given the choice to have a percentage of my Twitch income go towards making sure artists are compensated for me using their music live on my stream I would jump at it. I’ve been involved directly and indirectly in the big bad Music Industry on and off for 20 years. I know musicians that rely on their performance royalty payments coming through to help them live.
The one thing I would like to see though, if this rolls out for everyone else is the allowance for us to keep our VODs without the audio channel. This would mean that as part of the agreement to use Copyrighted music on stream, the streamer would have to set up OBS so that their music track does not send to their Twitch VOD. For a DJ or music focussed streamer, not having music on the VOD makes the VOD essentially redundant. For streams with a different focus, no music in the VOD just makes it quieter.
This could be an opportunity for Twitch to develop an app that allows people set up a virtual audio channel for this exact purpose. Or maybe some sort of OBS add on. I dunno, I’m an ideas man, not a programmer. But if that ends up happening down the track, I would like credit…it’s my moral right under Copyright. See what I did there?
WHAT’S STOPPING THEM?
I get that perhaps because Twitch exists in a number of different markets around the globe that negotiating a one-size-fits-all solution to this may be hard. But I think this is maybe a good step towards something happening. Realistically, Twitch is basically just a big public space that we exist in, performing whatever we do live on there.
Some of us like to play music to the public who visit us. So we should be paying a licence to do this. It works for every supermarket, cafe, pharmacy, nursery, hardware store and live venue out there as well as anywhere else you can think of where you hear music when you’re outside of your house. So realistically it should be able to work for Twitch.
Scaling would even work the same. The larger the business, the bigger their licence. The larger the viewership of the Twitch streamer, you would think the bigger their Twitch income, so their chunk that goes through would be bigger than a small time streamer.
CONCLUSION
I think though the release of the Twitch DJ Program information has been spotty and not very clear, at least to me, this is a good step forward. The more information that comes out, the more we’ll know how well it will work. Will the Big Bad Wolves want an unrealistically large chunk of our streaming income? No idea. Will they suddenly get draconian towards anyone not in the DJ program and start taking down live channels even if they’re not saving audio to their VOD? I hope not.
FURTHER STUFF TO CHECK OUT
Copyright Act 1968 – Australian Legislation
Copyright Act 1976 – US Legislation
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 – UK Legislation
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