- Well, we all knew this day was going to come.
It's here now, let's fix this.
So you've probably heard the news by now
that this week many top streamers on Twitch
have been hit with DMCA takedown notices
or copyright strikes for music that has been used
and found in clips over the past few years.
This is even worse for those of you that are creators
that have been streaming for several years now
and potentially have thousands of clips
on their Twitch channel,
that could earn them a copyright strike.
And Twitch, just like YouTube,
have implemented a three-strike system.
So if you get three of these DMCA takedown requests
on your channel,
your whole channel can be permanently deleted.
So, deleting everything that you've worked so hard for.
And this is happening right now to popular streamers,
who are getting multiple takedown notices from clips
from three plus years ago.
But fear not, you've come to the right place.
I promise you by the end of this video,
this will no longer be an issue
because, I don't only want to talk about what's going on
on Twitch right now with these takedown notices,
but I'm also going to be covering six different places
where you can find great legitimate music
that you can use in your stream
without fear of getting a copyright strike.
And we'll also be covering some tools
that will help you go through your backlog of clips
and VODs to make sure that you have
no offending items still on your Twitch channel.
So, let's waste no time.
Let's fix this.
(upbeat music)
So let's start by talking about actually what is happening
because I've seen a lot of misinformation
on places like Twitter,
and I want to help you guys have
the best understanding that you can.
Essentially two major record labels rumored
to be Universal and Warner Brothers,
have started working with a company
to sift through a collection
of clips from popular streamers,
and file takedown notices
when they have found copyrighted music from their artists.
Copyrighted music is essentially any music
that you don't own the rights to broadcast.
So, I've seen some people saying
that they pay for Spotify or Amazon Music
or YouTube Music or any platform like that,
but that is simply not the same.
If you pay for a subscription to Spotify,
all that does is give you the license
to be able to listen to that music on a personal device.
It doesn't give you the rights to broadcast that music
to other people across the internet.
I've also seen a lot of people
raising their pitchforks at Twitch,
asking them why they're issuing all
of these copyright strikes right now.
But really, Twitch isn't at fault here.
It's kind of taken out of their hands.
Sure there's plenty that Twitch could have done,
because the writing has been on the wall
about this happening for the platform
for a number of years now.
But in terms of actually what's happening
with these DMCA takedown notices,
and then a copyright strike,
Twitch really isn't at fault.
Like pretty much every other platform out there,
Twitch makes use of something called safe harbor,
which is built into DMCA,
which essentially states that they are not responsible
for the copyright infringement of users on their platform.
But to be able to be protected by safe harbor,
they have to follow a few different guidelines.
Number one, they must have a system in place
for takedown notices to be issued.
Number two, they must follow through
with legitimate takedown requests
and actually remove the offending material.
And then number three,
they must have a system in place
that prevents repeat offenders.
So, what can you do as a streamer on Twitch
to protect yourself from these copyright strikes
and potentially losing your channel?
Well, it really is as simple as
stop using copyrighted music.
It's gotten to the point now
where Twitch is no longer
a niche little website on the internet.
People know about it.
Certainly now the record labels know about it
and they're coming to make sure
that you're not using their content on your stream.
If you think that the current situation is bad,
I promise you is only going to get worse.
We've actually heard from Noah Downs,
who is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property law,
that these companies are also monitoring live streams
as they happen for copyright infringement,
and are likely to act on that at some point too,
with takedown notices.
- [Noah Downs] It is Warner,
and so, Universal Music Group and Warner,
have invested in this company
that's monitoring every stream on Twitch.
And, they have the ability to issue live DMCA's,
they just haven't done it yet.
And so it's super important to note that,
that level of enforcement
hasn't even come through yet.
Where you're live,
and you're getting taken down live for playing music.
Right now we're just seeing clips and bonds.
- So the simplest way for this
to no longer be a problem for you
is to stop using copyrighted music.
I know that it sucks.
I've completely sympathize with you
'cause it's been fine for years,
but really, this is a problem
that is only going to get worse now.
But the good news is that there are plenty
of legitimate places where you can find music
that you can use on stream, legally and not get issued
with one of these strikes.
I've put together a list of six different places
with huge libraries of music
that you guys can use, in your Twitch streams.
Some of which are free, some of which are paid.
Twitch actually used to have a free library
of music that you could use on your live streams
but upon researching this video,
I found that they no longer support it
and the only way I could find
the website was to use the Internet Archive
to go back in time to see what it originally looked like.
I'm not really sure why that's disappeared
and why it's been removed,
but anyway, I still got six great places
where you guys can go to get music for your live streams.
So starting off with free places
that you can get music for your live streams,
we'll kick things off with the internet classic,
which is NoCopyrightSounds.
If you're looking for electronic music,
no copyright sounds has been a staple
on the internet since 2011.
They've got hundreds of artists,
thousands of tracks, and they're incredibly popular,
especially in the YouTube community,
as a place to go for copyright free music.
You can use any of their music on Twitch.
All that they ask is that you add a credit to them
by adding a link in your stream description.
Next we have our resident stream Dr. Harris Heller,
who has been releasing music under the name StreamBeats
for the last few months.
These are more instrumental and ambient tracks
perfect for filling the background of your streams,
leaving plenty of room for your own voice
to chat over the top.
Right now as I'm recording this,
streambeats is a collection of about 200 tracks.
But as I said, Harris is adding more as time goes on.
So this library is only going to get bigger.
Next we have incompetech which is a website
with around 2000 different tracks
that all been created by musician, Kevin MacLeod.
I don't know how you say your name Kevin,
but thank you very much for the free music.
In the 2000 tracks, there's a variety of different genres
and as long as you are crediting
the website and the creator,
then you're free to use this music in your streams.
Next we have Pretzel Rocks,
which is a platform that has been built
for live streaming only.
They have two different tiers.
A free tier, which just requires
that you use their chat bot in your stream
and that posts info about each new song that plays
and then they have a premium tier,
which is at $5 per month.
And that just removes the requirement
for the chat attribution.
Pretzel Rocks has a pretty impressive library covering
various different genres,
around 10,000 different tracks.
So, $5 a month for their paid version
or free if you want to use the chat attribution.
So now am moving fully into the pay tier.
We have the ever popular Monstercat,
which is an electronic music label,
which has been very popular with creators since 2011.
Similar to nocopyrightsounds,
their library is mainly electronic music,
but it does boast an impressive collection of artists.
To be able to stream and use their music claim free,
you need to have their gold tier which costs $5 per month.
Like I said, it's mainly electronic music
but if that takes your fancy,
there is an impressive number of tracks
and really quite a good roster of different artists.
Finally, we have Epidemic Sound
who I have been using on both my Twitch channel
and my YouTube videos
for the last three years.
They have a huge library of music
with over 32,000 tracks, and loads of sound effects as well
in pretty much every genre you can imagine.
And they've already got hundreds of playlists set up
so you don't need to spend time
searching for the tracks to fit your mood.
You can use their music without issues on Twitch,
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, in your podcasts.
And they've got a really unique feature called stems,
which allows you to download individual parts of a song,
which I use all the time for my YouTube videos
as it allows me to make a song completely instrumental
by downloading all of the instruments
and leaving out the vocals.
They're a little bit more expensive at $15 per month,
but with the amount of choice that you have
from their huge library,
and the range of different places
that you can then use that music,
honestly, they are one of my top recommendations
if you can afford them.
They often do deals around Black Friday sort of time
which I've mentioned before in my videos,
so with this whole DMCA takedown thing on Twitch,
I reached out to them
to see if they could sort you guys out with a deal.
Thankfully they were really sympathetic
with what's going on,
and they have arranged a extended deal for you guys.
So what you can do, is you can get 30 days free use
of their library, you can see all of the tracks,
use them in your Twitch streams,
use them in your YouTube videos
and then after that,
if you wish to continue your subscription,
you're going to get 50% off for the second and third month.
So, one free month, 50% off for months two and three.
All you have to do, is use the link down in the description
along with gaming careers at checkout.
They've not sponsored this video
or paid me to say any of this.
It's just who I use, and I thought I would reach out
to them to see if I could get you guys a discount as well.
Okay so that is now combined six different places
that have given you guys,
where you can go and find royalty free music
or music that you can get with a license
so you can stream on Twitch completely legally
using this music without fear
of getting a DMCA takedown request or a copyright strike.
But what about all of those VODs and clips
that you've gotten your stream
from the previous years
that might have some copyrighted music inside?
Well, in this panic thankfully
the community has come to the rescue
and a couple of members of the Twitch community,
have actually built tools overnight really
to be able to download and delete any offending clips
from your Twitch account.
I will preface this by saying
that these have been built very quickly
so they're not by any means full finished products.
They really require a little bit
of tinkering to get working.
I'm going to take you through one of them
on my computer right now which allows you
to actually download all of your Twitch clips
and delete them from your account,
really removing the risk
of getting any kind of takedown request.
Also, it's worth mentioning that Twitch have announced
that they're working on something as a top priority
to help streamers that have thousands
of clips in their backlog,
to help them remove that offending content
from their channel.
But, judging by the fact that Twitch have had so long
to prepare for this moment really
with the writing being on the wall,
I wouldn't hold my breath and the safest thing to do
is unfortunately to remove any offending content
from your Twitch channel.
Okay, so the tool that we're going to be using
to download and then remove our clips from Twitch,
has been developed by a guy called Dane Fairbanks
over on Twitter.
So big shout out to him.
I think he literally built overnight when the news came out.
I will leave a link to the GitHub,
which is actually where you download
the program in the description down below.
But there's one thing that you need to do
before you can actually use the program.
And that is to get your auth token from Twitch.
So, this is a private thing.
You don't want to be posting this anywhere
but to be able to access your auth token,
when you go over to the Twitch website,
make sure you're logged in.
And then if you're on Chrome,
press F12 to bring up the console,
make sure you're the console tab up here,
and then copy and paste in that code,
which will be cookies,
and then auth token
and then below it you should see your auth token pasted.
I'm going to blur mine out obviously,
because they're like passwords,
you shouldn't share them with anyone.
They'll be a long string of digits and numbers,
and you're going to need that to actually use the program.
Back over on the GitHub page,
you want to head down to the bottom
and download here the legacy version.
It has updated already,
since scripting the video
with a couple of experimental versions here,
probably trynna fix some bugs that people are having.
I've had no issues just with the legacy version.
So that's the one I'll recommend.
Obviously if you are having issues,
come back here and see if either
of these other versions will work.
Like I said, he's built this overnight.
There's going to be some issues
and probably a lot of people downloading this
to make sure they're not going to get
any strikes for old clips.
Once that's finished downloading,
you can unzip it somewhere.
I'm going to do it to my desktop,
and then going to run the program,
paste in my auth token that I took from Twitch.
Next you'll be given an option
to choose which type of clips you want
to download and potentially delete.
The clips that you have taken
so, clips on your channel
and clips on other people's channel
that you have taken yourself,
or clips just on your channel that other people have taken.
So I'd recommend choosing number two
for the purposes of this video.
You then get the options to whether or not you want
to download them obviously if you want to
have these memories saved then yes,
I would recommend downloading them.
And then secondly, you get the option as to whether
you want to delete them from Twitch.
Now, this is completely up to you.
If you're following this video
you probably are wanting to delete them.
Like I said before, I've been using Epidemic Sounds
for the last three years now
so I don't actually want to delete any of the clips
from my channel so I'm going to choose no.
But, if you do want to remove them
you want to choose yes here.
Once you click that you can see now we are going
through all of the different clips that people have taken,
you can see the title of the clip,
who actually made the clip,
as well as a bit of information.
And then in the folder where the program is running,
you can see we have a downloads folder.
And this is actually where all the downloaded clips
are going to save.
So, it does take a few seconds per clip as you can see,
and if you have thousands of clips,
this is going to take a long time,
you probably going to need to leave it going overnight.
But this is the situation that we've been left in.
Now although I said that Twitch weren't necessarily
to blame for what is happening right now
with the takedown and the strikes,
I do think that they could have prepared much better
'cause they've definitely known that this is a situation
that we're going to be facing probably
for at least five years now 'cause they saw
five years behind what happened on YouTube
when this first started happening on YouTube.
And there's things that they definitely should have got
in place by now.
One thing that I would really like to see is
them implement some kind of system
with Amazon Music 'cause we've seen
these Twitch watch parties I think is what they're called,
where people can now stream shows that are on Amazon Prime
and watch them with their audience.
And obviously that benefits both Amazon Prime,
as well as the Twitch streamer.
And it'd be great if they could sort out
some kind of release relationship with the music labels,
where they can also stream Amazon Music
if you're streaming on Twitch.
That'd be real beneficial.
But that's not something they're going to be able
to arrange in a short period of time.
So I hope they're already working on that.
In the meantime, I'd love for them to have ways
for you to be able to search through your clips
and find moments where they've detected copyrighted music
'cause they definitely have that system in place
for VODs, where they automatically mute your VOD.
They just need to bring something across
the clips so that they can tell streamers,
we've noticed some copyrighted material in this clip,
would you like to delete it?
Anyway, I hope that this video has been helpful.
I realized it's been a bit long
but I wanted to cover, what's going on,
what you should do about it in the future going forward,
and what you should do about it
about your clips from the past.
So, hopefully this has helped you
and you haven't got any strikes coming to your channel.
I do really just want to reiterate
that you should be streaming music
that you have licenses to.
Don't stream copyrighted content anymore.
They know about Twitch
and it's just going to get worse and worse
and the rules are going to get more and more strict.
So, I hope you have a good stream
and I'll catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(upbeat music)
(gun fires)