- Karma Factory
- Jun 12, 2021
- 3 min read
Though I do not stream music on Twitch.tv, Scott my recording partner does. And before our recording session last week, we had a bit of a chat about Twitch's crackdown on VOD (video on demand) replay of past twitch streams. The new policy is ANY music being played that is not original music composition and instrumentation is "verboten". So playing covers on a stream is ok, but you can't keep the audio of that cover song on the VOD to be seen later. I read up on it and have a few thoughts. Actually I think I just need to vent once in a while and Twitch gets it between the eyes this month.
Twitch makes very little $$ from the music area of twitch. Using the last 7 days metrics in the "Music" category, Music only provides 1.2% of the average viewers with 1,312 channels and 1.2% of the total time watched hours at (5,942,983 total hours in 7 days) (as of 6/12/21) (LINK)
By comparison, "Grand Theft Auto V" has 9% and 43 million hours and "Just Chatting" has 12.8% and 61 million hours. (again as of 6/12/21)
The reason Twitch doesn't want to pay royalties to the RIAA is the CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) just doesn't provide positive revenue. In layman's terms, "it's a money making loser".
By having the RIAA and Twitch threaten musicians who cover other artists songs with a three strikes out policy, it sends a signal to the music group on Twitch that they will not be paying royalty's and these Twitch streamers must "silence" their VOD's, or face the wrath of getting banned. First I think this is short sighted since at least a portion of the music being played is quite old. (How many streamers play "Brown Eyed Girl" or some popular older songs?) With the collapse of the music industry in the late 90's early 2000's where music corporations lost their monopoly on artists (to the internet, LOL) and the billions they brought in, those corporations still in many cases, own the publishing rights, and therefore continue to squeeze as much money out of artists songs as possible. Artists who still own their publishing rights are now selling to publishing companies. Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Paul Simon to name a few. This means the companies buying these publishing rights are looking to make money over time but the speculation is music royalties can be steady income. In order to GET that money, the publishing companies have to crack down on use so the money goes to the corporate owners.
Music corporations are not investing in artists that write their own music. Writing music is now done in a collaboration method with usually, multiple producers, and it seems these multiple producers know what songwriting techniques, keys, which production techniques to use (quantizing, auto-tune) so they create songs in a formulaic method on a laptop that checks all the popular boxes. How many auto-tune songs in Ab do we need exactly? Guitar solo, who plays solo's anymore? Guitar based pop music? Whut? Prior generations had such amazing music, written by artists, played buy humans who played music together on actual instruments and not samples. This may explain why say in 1973 for example, an album like "Yessongs" from Yes comes out, as well as Steely Dan "Countdown to Ecstasy", The Stooges "Raw Power", Stevie Wonder "Innervisions", Led Zeppelin "Houses of the Holy", The Isley Brothers "3+3", Roxy Music "For Your Pleasure", Bob Marley & The Wailers "Catch Fire", Elton John "Yellow Brick Road", Marvin Gaye "Let's Get it On", The Who "Quadrophenia", Paul McCartney & Wings "Band on the Run", The New York Dolls "New York Dolls". I picked 1973 at random and there are artists there who will be listened to for the next 100 years. THAT is why the music corporations and publishing groups are spending millions buying publishing rights of OLD music and not investing in NEW music artists.
My last point here is, new generations are discovering older classic rocks, glam rock, punk, acid rock and getting newer generations to appreciate such music is key. Artists on twitch find these songs, play and enjoy these songs themselves, with their own instrumentation, with their own appreciation of what came before them in hopes that others will see the (in many cases) brilliance. Yet groups like Twitch, RIAA and publishing groups want to make sure they get their money, not for the artists but for their INVESTMENTS. I do not blame artists who actually own their publishing to sell - they deserve the money! But the corporations only have one thing in mind - a future payoff, in some cases, in the hundreds of millions of dollars over years, and they can't have some Twitch streamer playing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for free. Here's some perspective by some people who know music.
Best argument against any of this? "Ok boomer". My response: "Screw you I'm Gen X".
