Twitch’s Soundtrack feature is now live and streamers can play music when they go live

Twitch’s Soundtrack feature, a new product that allows streamers play music while they are live, is now up and running. As The Verge reports, if this product works the way Twitch says it does, Soundtrack will be more than just a way to play music (that’s cleared of rights) while you are broadcasting. Also, it might change how music is used on Twitch entirely.

Soundtrack solves a pretty simple issue that Twitch streamers have been facing. If songs are copyrighted, you cannot use them while streaming unless you have rights to those songs. If you do end up using copyrighted music during a broadcast, there isn’t much that Twitch can do because it is live.

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Now, if users make clips from that broadcast, or the VOD of the stream is left online, the streamer will get a copyright strike from the original rights holder. And three strikes mean a permanent ban from Twitch. Also, VODs are automatically muted if they’re found to contain copyrighted music.

Twitch streamers have been hit by a whole bunch of wave copy strikes from labels in June this year and some for year-old clips that didn’t make themselves.

This is what makes the Twitch Soundtrack feature interesting. It is a separate application that “interfaces with your streaming software” and currently supports OBS, Streamlabs OBS and Twitch Studio.

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Twitch Soundtrack separates music stream into its own channel and broadcasts simultaneously but separately. An integration like this allows Twitch to automatically strip music from the VOD of the live stream - and that’s because “songs that are cleared for live use aren’t necessarily also cleared for use in recordings”. But, this allows Twitch to do a lot of “cool platform-side things with the music itself”.

So now, when you are going to watch a streamer who is using Soundtrack in their broadcast, you will be able to see some additional information there from Twitch.

At the bottom of the stream there will be a widget that shows what song is playing, which update is live etc. It also links to the artist’s Spotify page and their Twitch channel (if they have one).

So Twitch is basically starting with a small group of labels and distribution platforms, including some indie ones like Dim Mak and bigger players like Soundcloud and DistroKid. Twitch is also going to curate playlists for specific moods, so artists on those playlists will possibly get to have an audience that’s “potentially as large as the live audience for Twitch”. 

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And not just playlists; Soundtrack will also feature libraries of music tuned to specific moods as ‘Stations’. Everything you see on Soundtrack is cleared for use on air, whether that’s tracks from playlists or deep cuts in the music library from which it’s sourcing tracks, The Verge writes.

Essentially, artists who may or may not be stars have a chance to break out on an entirely separate platform.