What’s a Twitch stream without any music? Some of the site’s streamers demonstrated the absurdity of silent streams recently after a slew of DMCA takedown requests resulted in Twitch deleting thousands of clips and ordering players to avoid popular music.
Content creators have recently seen videos lost or muted as “representatives for the major record labels started sending thousands of DMCA notifications each week,” according to Twitch. Before May, Twitch said it handled “fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications each year,” so to deal with the influx, it deleted the offending clips, and warned streamers not to play recorded music in their streams unless they owned the rights or to just mute the game audio.
For many games, muting music isn’t an option, nor is getting rid of sound effects. So streamers have responded with the #DMCASoundoff hashtag as a sort of protest, and the results are as hilarious as they are frustrating.
Streamer Chainbrain posted a clip of himself playing metal music to a video stream of Rocksmith without any sound.
“Sound pretty good I think!” he wrote. “You all get a more realistic sweaty metalhead experience!”
Streamer Jambo, meanwhile, added her own dragon shrieks to a Skyrim stream.
Another Rocksmith player, JayCaulls, “took Twitch’s advice” and muted his stream while playing Blur’s “Song 2” to giggle-worthy results.
Twitch apologized last week for how it handled the takedowns.
“One of the mistakes we made was not building adequate tools to allow creators to manage their own VOD and Clip libraries. You’re rightly upset that the only option we provided was a mass deletion tool for Clips, and that we only gave you three-days notice to use this tool,” it wrote in a lengthy blog post. “We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools awhile ago. That we didn’t is on us. 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.”
The takedown notices will likely continue, however. Twitch is recommending players “use a fully licensed alternative like Soundtrack by Twitch, or other rights cleared music libraries such as Soundstripe, Monstercat Gold, Chillhop, Epidemic Sound, and NCS.” It has thus far only received a handful of DMCA notifications targeting in-game music, Twitch says.
Twitch hasn’t yet commented on #DMCASoundoff, which is at least good for a laugh right now.
