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November 12, 2020 10:00 am

Twitch Says It's In Talks To License Music, Tells Users To Delete Videos With Unauthorized Tracks

In a lengthy blog post, Twitch told streamers that they must stop playing recorded music on their streams (unless it's officially licensed) and that "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." Variety reports: The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform also claimed that it is "actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service." However, the company also said that the "current constructs for licenses" that record labels have with other services (which typically take a cut of revenue from creators for payment to record labels) "make less sense for Twitch." "We're open-minded to new structures that could work for Twitch's unique service, but we must be clear that they may take some time to materialize or may never happen at all," the company said in the blog. Twitch's music-copyright communique comes after several major U.S. music organizations -- including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA -- sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of "allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members' music without authorization, in violation of Twitch's music guidelines." Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry's crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users' archived content, "mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips." Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year. Twitch said it analyzed DMCA notifications received from the end of May through mid-October and found that more than 99% of them were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. Twitch apologized to creators for the angst the DMCA takedowns have caused, noting that a warning email it sent to many last month about the videos deleted from their accounts "didn't include all the information that you'd typically get in a DMCA notification." "We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools a while ago. That we didn't is on us," it said. "And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better."

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