The past few weeks have been extremely difficult for Twitch streamers that regularly use music within their streams. This is due primarily to a massive wave of DMCA requests that were sent to streamers for use of music that they did not have the rights to. However, what has made this event the most stressful for these streamers is the threat of their Twitch account being banned without providing the cause of their infraction.
Naturally, this has led to many popular streamers cleansing their archives of any and all clips on their channels as every single clip could count as a possible infraction of DMCA policies and cause their Twitch account to be deleted. While many streamers have chosen to seek out alternatives to the music they normally play on their streams, the often polarizing streamer xQc seems to have another idea in mind.
In a recent stream, the Luminosity sponsored streamer said that he was interested in purchasing the licensing rights to play the song Exitlude by The Killers to use as the outro song for his streams. According to xQc, he believes that the song stream's identity that he doesn't want to lose. At one point he asks his chat how much they think it would cost him, with some members of the chat seeming to believe it would be $25,000 at least.
While in the clip xQc mentions tweeting at The Killers in order to get permission, in reality he would need to get in contact with the band's licensing rights holder. For The Killers, this would mean purchasing a license from Universal Music Publishing Group which would likely be very expensive.
While xQc seems willing to drop as much money as possible into securing this one song from The Killers, other streamers are not nearly as lucky. These other streamers are being forced to turn to Twitch's new service: Soundtrack. Soundtrack is a Twitch creator tool that recently entered beta that allows streamers to utilize music that has been cleared of possible DMCA infractions.
While this tool may seem like a great alternative, it was recently reported that Soundtrack features several songs that Twitch does not have the licensing rights to. According to a letter obtained by Variety, the RIAA stated that Twitch has been negligent of the proper licenses that are required for it to operate a feature like Soundtrack. Twitch refuted those claims, saying that Soundtrack is a great service for streamers to discover new artists and is a fully licensed service.