Twitch Soundtrack

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

~ the goodbye ~

twitch soundtrack sat in a part of the twitch product surface i had no reason to open. i was in my late thirties by 2020, working on other things, not streaming. i watched valorant tournaments and dota through the year the tool existed. the dmca crisis on twitch was a story i read about in the streaming press without ever having a stake in the outcome. every music-adjacent product twitch shipped in the 2019-2020 window (soundtrack and sings on one side, the mixer counter-programming on the other) landed in a corner of the site my session never touched.

twitch launched soundtrack into public beta on 30 september 2020, six weeks after the first riaa mass wave of dmca takedown notices on streamer vods. the fix twitch tried was to build a desktop app that pulled from a rights-cleared music library on a separate audio channel. the streamer's game audio and voice went out on the main channel. the music went out on a second channel that would be stripped from vods and clips before archival. live viewers heard everything. archived viewers heard game audio without the music, which was safe from a takedown perspective.

the library was built through partner label deals rather than a general licensing agreement. empire and monstercat and a handful of smaller indie labels contributed catalogs. the artists received the license fees through the label partnership rather than through direct twitch payments. what streamers got was a catalog of a few thousand tracks they could use without worrying about later dmca strikes. what they did not get was any of the popular music that had triggered the crisis in the first place.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the adoption problem ~

the community response was polite and small. streamers who cared about legally clean vods were already using pretzel.rocks or streambeats by harris heller, both of which had a head start on soundtrack and covered similar catalog gaps. streamers who did not care about dmca compliance kept playing whatever they wanted and dealt with strikes as they arrived. soundtrack occupied the awkward middle. it was more convenient than pretzel for twitch integration and less curated than streambeats for taste. the desktop app itself was an extra install that had to be running during a broadcast, which added friction.

the rights-cleared audio channel technique was the actually interesting part of the tool. splitting music into a second audio stream that vods could strip was a clean engineering solution to the dmca problem, and other platforms in the same window (kick and tiktok live among them) landed on some variant of the split-audio approach. twitch shipped the idea first and then let the product die once it turned out nobody wanted to run a second desktop app to do it.

~ what really happened ~

twitch announced the shutdown on 17 july 2023 in a short help-center post. the wording was that soundtrack had seen limited use from the community over three years and that plenty of alternative rights-cleared libraries were available. the recommended replacement was outertone, routenote's copyright-free edm label with about 1,600 free tracks. streamers who had been running soundtrack in their production kit lost the app on the shutdown date. no migration path, no export of playlists. the desktop app stopped resolving against the license server and had to be uninstalled.

what got buried with soundtrack was a specific bet twitch had made in the 2019-2020 window that music tooling would be part of its platform diversification. sings died in january 2021 for licensing reasons. mixer had already died in july 2020 to microsoft's own decision. twitch studio (the standalone streaming client) was in a slow decline through the same period. by 2023 twitch had gone back to what it does, which is people playing videogames on a webcam, and the music-tooling wing of the site was fully wound down.

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