Twitch’s DMCA Takedowns Threaten to Drive Musicians Away
Twitch once looked like a lifeline for DJs and singers during the pandemic. The platform’s copyright issues tarnish that promise.
PHOTOGRAPH: SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
AS A FAN of underground electronic music, the music producer, Twitch streamer, and label owner Chris Reed, who goes by the stage name Plastician, was used to going the extra mile to catch a show.
“I literally used to have to climb through tower block building windows and hide from the police.” Today, he’s a DJ and runs a music label called Terrorhythm. He goes on, “This is like nothing compared to the shit we've had to put up with before. A lot of us have been through shit like this in the past.”
The shit in question is his and other DJs’ ongoing struggle with the DMCA. While Plastician no longer finds himself climbing through windows or ducking the police, he navigates a more abstract, virtual obstacle course: Twitch.
As Twitch grew, so did the diversity of content. Initially a site dominated by video game streamers, in 2015, the website created a new category of content called Creative and IRL. Then, by 2018, the company announced that this category had “exploded in growth,” and as a result, it created a new category for music.
For Dave Eckbald and many other DJs, Twitch became a way to maintain their local music scene during the coronavirus pandemic. Before the pandemic, he worked in music promotion and co-owned a record store. Now, he produces the Twitch stream for the Minneapolis-based music collective Intellephunk.
Intellephunk wasn’t the only music group to take its music to Twitch. At the outset of the pandemic, musicians flooded the platform with content to make up for canceled live events. Entire concerts and music festivals went completely online to Twitch and streaming platforms like it. A report from StreamElements noted that the number of hours users spent watching music and performing arts rose from 3.6 million to 17.6 million hours over the course of one year.
But that rosiness and excitement soon started to dissolve.
Last October, Twitch sent a letter to streamers regarding Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations. Any channel that had video content with copyrighted music must take it down or risk having their channel deleted. The public backlash was so strong that Twitch issued an apology within 24 hours. The company stated that the frustration of streamers was “completely justified,” and that it was just as surprised as content creators were by the volume of DMCA requests it had received. But Twitch maintained its warning: “If you play recorded music on your stream, you need to stop.”
DJs already know the threat of copyright abuse. Twitch’s DMCA takedowns represent another setback in a long history of push and pull between creators and copyright enforcement. What is new, however, is how these stories illustrate the larger issue of uneven and confusing copyright enforcement on the internet. As Twitch doubles down, DJs cast doubt on the platform’s future with music.
Sarvesh Ramprakash, also known as Icarus Redux, started in Los Angeles’ electronic music scene in 2014. Today he spins at shows across the midwest and organizes music communities for artists of color. He told me he hasn’t performed recently on Twitch, specifically because of the DMCA issue.
Even as some performers continue livestreaming on Twitch, Ramprakash still avoids the website today. “DMCA takedowns are perhaps something that one can take in stride, because audio isn't muted while the stream is going. But it's not a good long-term solution if you're trying to build up some kind of brand via a specific channel,” he says.
It’s also risky. Twitch uses a three-strike policy for its users. If a creator gets more than three strikes, Twitch could ban them entirely.
Identifying copyrighted music on services like Twitch is entirely automatic, with very little human intervention, even at the appeals stage. This means that platforms like Twitch will more likely catch popular, well-known music than obscure, underground sounds. This created a unique problem for streamers who wanted to play Harmonix’s rhythm game, Fuser. In the game, you play as a DJ and mix sets for a roaring virtual crowd.
“When I first decided I wanted to stream Fuser, the question of DMCA was absolutely the first thing on my mind” says composer and streamer Ryan Mitchum, who goes by the name Chongo online. He went and looked up the rules for streaming the game. Although he felt apprehensive about it, he ended up streaming it on a whim.
He says , “As someone who's made mashups and other types of derivative content on Youtube for a pretty good chunk of time, I think that I've honestly just been desensitized to getting my work taken down by copyright blocks.”
Even those that play original music aren’t exempt from issues. Plastician says, “A lot of the music I play personally is often unreleased. A lot of it is my own and music that's been sent to me from the people who produced it. So in many cases, not a lot of the music I play gets picked up by DMCA, because it doesn't exist in the system anywhere.”
However, when he first started out, he faced a unique problem. “At the beginning, a lot of the music that received DMCAs was music by my label. So I'm seeing DMCAs for stuff that I owned,” he says. He wanted himself and others to be able to use his music without fear of a DMCA strike. “I had to speak to my distributor and ask, ‘What is causing these strikes?’ Because my personal stance is, I don't mind people streaming my music on their streams. I am quite happy for them to do it.”
His distributor said that one vendor was the cause of all the takedowns, a database called Audible Magic. Once he removed it from the database, the DMCA notices stopped.
I asked Plastician if he had any luck working with Twitch to resolve previous strikes. He tells me, “I sent in a few requests to reverse some of them in the past. I didn’t notice any email to open up the dispute, so I can’t really comment on that, since I personally haven’t had any contact from Twitch. Not yet anyways.”
Some DJs have a different, new approach: Bypass Twitch altogether and they don’t have to worry about copyright abuse and DMCA takedowns. Besides, many DJs aren’t anchored to Twitch the same way that game streamers are, and they’re willing to build their own alternatives, assuming their audiences will come with them.
Eckbald says he is "definitely working towards a custom self-host solution." His streams never used Twitch’s tipping system, so he’s not worried about losing monetization features unique to the platform. He says it was nice to use something already built, but “we're not going to lose anything from going away."
Bryan Kasenic, founder of the Bunker New York, had one of his resident DJs on Twitch at one point, and he thinks the new platform is a huge improvement in both design and audio quality, whereas, the stream on Bunker, “looks like Bunker. From a branding and feel perspective, it’s a lot better.”
Kasenic voices a larger distrust of big social media platforms like Twitch. He says platforms “get us to move all our followers there, and then they stop delivering our content to our followers unless we pay money. After that happened a few times, I didn’t want to give any other site that power.” So far, neither Kasenic nor the Bunker have run into serious issues with DMCA takedowns while using Vimeo.
In the face of DMCA takedowns and copyright abuse, unpredictable social platforms, and a global pandemic that demolished live events, the DJs I spoke to remained collected. While all of these factors hit DJs the hardest, facing these circumstances on a regular basis also taught them how to be scrappy.
As Plastician puts it, “We'll keep doing what we're doing until someone kicks us out.”
Source: Twitch’s DMCA Takedowns Threaten to Drive Musicians Away