Flick the Twitch

Videogame live streaming platform Twitch has launched a free-to-use music library including over 500 songs from a variety of labels, though there appears to be a distinct focus on EDM. The tracks are cleared for use by Twitch broadcasters to accompany their activity, for live content and archived video.

Chief Strategy Officer at Twitch Colin Carrier said: “Our community has been vocal about the importance of music for their broadcasts and their love of music in general. By working with both established and upcoming record labels, we are now able to offer music for them to use that is cleared for live broadcasts and archiving”.

Amazon purchased Twitch in August 2014 for £585m amidst a lot of chatter about the emerging popularity of ‘e-sports’ as a thing.

The platform focuses on video games including live playthroughs, broadcasts of e-sports competitions and other so called gaming ‘events’. If you don’t quite get it, find out more here.

Twitch has also launched a new music initiative allowing artists to broadcast their music using the beta Music category. The Music category is listed among the hundreds of game titles a broadcaster can designate for a particular stream. It is an interesting move, as Twitch had previously implemented a censoring system that automatically scanned and muted sections of video that have copyrighted audio. With a reported user base of over 55m, a lack of tracks under copyright to the service was only going to become more of a problem for users, Twitch and the music industry alike.