Twitch Sings

» see sings.twitch.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i did not use twitch sings. by 2019 i was 35, working on other things, not the demographic for a karaoke streaming game. really though, the whole twitch performing-arts wing of the platform (just chatting, singing, art streams) sat in a corner of the site i never opened. i watched valorant tournaments and the occasional dota international, and closed the tab. twitch sings existed in my peripheral vision as a "wait harmonix made a twitch game" moment and then faded (roughly).

the game shipped on windows and macos on 13 april 2019 after being announced the previous october at twitchcon 2018. harmonix was the developer, the same boston studio behind guitar hero (through 2007) and rock band. twitch was the publisher and provided the streaming plumbing. the client cost nothing to install and shipped with over two thousand licensed songs, which was the number that made the whole thing possible at all: a karaoke experience is only as interesting as the songs on offer.

the design was interesting in the way twitch things sometimes were in that window (mixer, twitch soundtrack, twitch studio all landed in the same 2019 twitchcon feature push). in fairness, sings had a duet mode where a viewer could join the streamer inside the same song and the performance broadcast to both channels' viewers at once. it had a karaoke-club overlay for chat participation, thumbs-up voting from the audience, and a stage-lighting mode that gave the client the look of an actual karaoke booth rather than a bare game window. the pitch was that the game was really a live entertainment platform sitting on top of a music catalog.

~ the case file ~

~ the licensing problem ~

in june 2020 the riaa sent twitch its first mass wave of dmca takedown notices over background music in streamer archives. really though, the twitch music-licensing framework was set up for live broadcast under short-form license clearance, not for archived vods and clips that could be reviewed against publisher catalogs after the fact. by autumn 2020 the whole platform was in a scramble mode, streamers were nuking their own vods, twitch was building automated audio-fingerprint scanners, and every music-adjacent product on the site had become a compliance liability.

sings was the most exposed product on twitch by that mechanism. every performance was a recording of a licensed song being sung on a broadcast that produced a vod. even with the karaoke-track license twitch had cleared for live performance, the archived vod created a second-order copyright question the framework had not settled. the shutdown notice went up on 4 september 2020, roughly ten weeks after the riaa wave started.

~ how it actually ended ~

the shutdown notice was polite about it in the way corporate shutdown notices sometimes are. the phrasing was that twitch wanted to invest in "broader tools and music services." the interpretation in the streaming press was that the music-services line meant twitch soundtrack, the royalty-free background music library that had launched in beta the same week and would itself be shut down in july 2023. either way the sings-specific reading was: this product is a licensing liability we cannot solve.

between 4 september and the 1 january 2021 shutoff twitch pulled the whole video archive. clips went first on 1 december. broadcasts and highlights followed on 1 january along with the servers. because sings was cloud-only there was no offline mode, no way to run the client after the servers stopped answering, no way to reference any performance ever recorded once the vods were gone. everything that had happened on the platform disappeared.

~ what got buried with it ~

harmonix went to epic games in 2021 as part of the fortnite music push (rock band 4 continued on legacy pcs and consoles). twitch soundtrack died in 2023. mixer, twitch's biggest competitor, had already died in july 2020. the whole 2019-vintage twitch feature push (sings, soundtrack, studio, mixer counter-programming) turned out to be a false start for the platform diversification pitch. by 2024 twitch had gone back to what it does, which is broadcasting people playing videogames. really though, the singing part was a rounding-error experiment that ran for twenty months and vanished so completely that even the vods do not exist to look at.

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