DMCA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, created in 1998 to protect artists' content from illegal distribution.
Early 2000s: with piracy at it's finest, the DMCA and artists lawsuits (ex: Metallica vs Napster in 2000) became an actual thing.
Today: the law is the same, but the way we consume music (within different industries) and the record labels' approach, changed.
Good old Bill was sitting in his office at Universal Music, moving around Youtuber's tears in his coffee with a spoon, when he saw an article about musicians streaming on Twitch because of Covid. So, he opened the website and discovered a new world of billions of hours of content, relevant for million of people and brands. Since Bill's office had a no-nerd-shit-space sign at the door, nobody mention it to him before.
Bill pick's up the phone and dials the DMCA's office number, in order to talk to Eddie. He explains to Ed all his research about E-gAming. Ed goes "I also just noticed i-GaminG Bill, these mother f^ckers have been playing copyrighted music in their videos for years, and they also do it live".
They quickly get in a zoom meeting with Lorie from Warner, where she goes "ahh...y'll calling late... give me a sec, let me open the Vacations to Bora-Bora GGWP DMCA folder to highlight a couple points".
On the other side, Twitch HQ, who magically ignored the idea of record labels ever changing their minds about nerd-shit, received a messenger pigeon from the DMCA stating that Universal and Warner will be looking into all creators' archives from 2017-2019 and they will give three strikes to every streamer who used copyrighted music, if they get all three, their account will be deleted.
So... Twitch gave the community a spam of time equal to zero days to adapt to the situation, resulting in streamers having to delete everything they have done so far.
Music has never been the main value for a streamer to get fans. The value goes to everything else on the stream making a case of fair-use of music. Is not like people will be saying "OMFG I can hear Drake's songs for free during Ninja's stream, I win against the system!" People watch the game, and the music eliminates Ninja's awkward silences really.
The other view goes to streamers choosing music to create a certain type of vibe to the stream which adds to the value of it, making background music an add-on feature, and record labels are not being paid for that.
Like it or not, the law has always been there and this was obviously coming. For young streamers to not think about it... I get it, but for old-ass grown ups to be surprised and for Twitch to never ever communicate it or had a plan prepared and just wait until the moment it happens, is hard to understand.
More regulations will come, we can take Youtube as a mirror.
For copyrighted music, there're only two right-holders: the ones who record the music and the song-writers. Sometimes is the same person, but sometimes there're several right-holders to a song. So, in order to be gucci, you need a sycronization license, which is really hard to get, unless you're Eddie's kid.
