As Twitch balloons in popularity, its growing community faces the increasing threat of takedown notices sent by rights-holders over uncleared music.
The platform has recently come under fire for its lack of music licensing deals as its community expands from video-game streamers to include all sorts of content creators. The artist run non-profit group Artists Right Alliance recently penned a letter criticizing Amazon CEO (which is Twitchs parent company) Jeff Bezos for his "inability or unwillingness" to take proactive steps to compensate artists as "Twitch uses music to grow its audience and shape its brand" after the exec admitted he didn't know if the company paid royalties for the music that was streamed on the platform.
Twitch seemingly responded to the growing controversy with the launch of Soundtrack by Twitch, "an in-platform music streaming service packed with more than 1 million rights-cleared songs by independent artists for Twitch streamers to use as background music in their livestreams, legally and free of charge."
Soundtrack was made available in the beta stage to certain content creators today to be primed for a wide release in the near future.
Billboard reports that Soundtrack was "made possible through partnerships with around 30 independent music companies, labels, publishers and aggregators, which are exchanging access to portions of their catalogs for exposure to Twitch's enormous user base."
Twitch will be incorporating Soundtrack into the platform by introducing a button that will allow a user to open the song on streaming services directly from the Twitch livestream.
Despite the recent deal, Twitch is still being criticized for its hesitance to "come to the negotiating table with major labels over broad music licenses for the platform."
If users aren't feeling the music in Soundtrack's catalog, though, they're always free to use the beats generously donated to the platform by T-Pain.
[via]