Soundtrack by Twitch is a good start, but far from perfect yet — My review on Twitch’s new solution on licensing music.
I mean, it’s still better than NCS.
This week, Twitch unveiled Soundtrack, a new program allowing rightsholders to license their music to be used on Twitch only — remember that — and allowing creators to use that music on their streams on Twitch.
How it actually works
You’ve probably seen Twitch’s article about how Soundtrack by Twitch lets you “stream worry free” and that it’s a “rights cleared music tool designed for Twitch creators” but how does it actually work?
Soundtrack for Twitch only works on OBS, Streamlabs OBS, and Twitch Studio. When you download the application to your computer, it installs a plugin into your broadcasting software that remaps the sound from your PC. All of your desktop audio will be synced as normal, but anything coming from the Soundtrack application is muted and won’t be recorded, streamed, or caught in OBS — if configured correctly.
This is designed to have the Twitch website or app play the music for your viewers itself rather than hear it from your stream. This way, it can separate the audio from your stream, since the music is licensed to Twitch and not you. This move is controversial among content creators
My review
When I first used Soundtrack by Twitch, my excitement for the program died in moments.
Playlists, and the overall catalog
There were only 4 stations and 4 playlists to choose from, and you weren’t able to see the songs in them until they played. You also weren’t allowed to create your own playlists, which I find essential to streaming music in the background. You can separate the songs you don’t like and keep the ones you do enjoy and play those ones all in the click of a button (or two if you like shuffle (which I do)) and even be able to share them with your fans which would bring more attention to the songs in the playlist, thus making this a potential revenue boost for the music, and showing your fans your personal stream playlist so that they may play those songs for their own streams or their own free time. Who else looked up the music that a creator played?
There is also no search bar on Soundtrack, so you aren’t able to look up certain songs if you’d like.
Muted Audio and other glitches
This one might just be me, but the Soundtrack integration on OBS didn’t seem to work for me. While it did show there was audio playing, my viewers said all the background audio in the stream was muted and all they could hear was my microphone and even the music didn’t play. Where my jams at?
Facebook Gaming
In case you haven’t heard, Facebook shook the streaming community and announced that they had partnered up with major music companies, labels and societies and licensed a massive catalog of music for their partners to stream, with plans to expand to their Level Up Program streamers.
As creators and entertainers, we know you want to play music during your gaming livestreams — and not just any old music, but music people know, that will get them HYPED as they watch. At the same time, you probably realize, or have heard from elsewhere that music rights are complex and hard to understand.
Instead of suggesting you go to music law school to figure it all out, we want to make the whole process a lot easier so you can focus on being a great streamer, and not a rights specialist. — Facebook Gaming
You can read more about that in the link above or you can read my article “Copyright, and how Facebook Gaming could revolutionize music and creators’ relationships” by clicking that long title.
Soundtrack by Twitch seemed like a letdown compared to Facebook Gaming’s solution. Twitch’s approach seems more like a music catalog that bundles all the music that artists are fine with you playing on stream rather than getting the larger songs that we all vibe to. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing though. It allows any artist big or small to be able to opt-in to the program and have a chance to get their music featured plus let the streaming industry use those songs to enhance their content, legally. It just seems like a lot less compared to how Facebook Gaming did it.
Channel Integration
Soundtrack by Twitch puts the song you play at the bottom of the player, so viewers are able to look at what’s playing easily instead of having to say !nowplaying in chat or something like that. It’s clean, informative and most importantly, it gets out of the way when you don’t want it there. Twitch Extensions are an amazing way of putting more on your stream and letting the viewer remove them if they’d like so it doesn’t clutter up the screen and the way Twitch made this for Soundtrack is flawless.
I do wish that more songs would show their cover art, but for now, it gets the job done.
Overall Verdict
I believe Twitch has made a good, simple start to bringing a new relationship between the streaming industry and the music industry together at last, but it has a lot of work to get up there. The catalog of music is decent and the playlists are good for listening to while streaming copyright-free, but I feel that they should have put more effort into the app and in licensing music. There are many things that Soundtrack lacks or overcomplicates, but I hope that in time, it gets up there. GLHF, Twitch!
