The new shooter Back 4 Blood issues a warning to content creators. The warning is apparently aimed primarily at streamers on Twitch. Developer Turtle Rock does not have streaming rights to the music used. Therefore, streamers should be cautious when broadcasting the game.
This is what Back 4 Blood says: An employee of Turtle Rock responsible for communication and influencers warns content creators via Twitter (via twitter):
“Attention content creators. If you bring Back 4 Blood as a video on demand, this is important: The jukebox has copyrighted music that plays when you use it. We do not have the streaming rights to the songs played there, so make sure to turn off the music when interacting with the jukebox.”
Alissa Barry
The music industry is really stressing Twitch since COVID
What is the problem? Turtle Rock does not explicitly address Twitch users, but it is clear that the warning is mainly directed at streamers on the largest streaming platform.
For a long time, copyrighted music was approached lightly on Twitch. Although it was officially forbidden to play music that the streamer does not own rights to, it remained without consequences for years.
During the COVID crisis, however, music publishers lost revenue from concerts and tours, and they discovered that their copyrighted music was being used by streamers on Twitch. They started hitting Twitch with copyright strikes if music was heard in videos. Twitch forwarded these strikes to streamers as warnings and deleted the corresponding clips because they were legally obligated to do so.
Streamers were afraid that their channels could be banned due to such strikes, and some deleted their video archives.
Meanwhile, there is an agreement with the music industry that streamers are “safer” and do not have to fear an immediate ban. Nevertheless, one should avoid transmitting copyrighted music.
Since last year, the video game industry has also become sensitive to the fact that the soundtracks of their games often contain copyrighted music that cannot simply be used on Twitch.
This could be the solution: Other games have now released a “streamer mode”. This mutes all copyrighted music in a game, so the streamer can show the game without fear of strikes.
For Back 4 Blood, it is said that they are currently working on such a stream mode. Until then, it seems to be: Be cautious with streaming.
When the discussion was relevant in 2020, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was imminent and Twitch itself gave advice:
Twitch advises on how to stream Cyberpunk 2077 without getting banned right away
