Much frothing of the mouth and jerking of knees has been taking place this week with the news that Twitch has been sent around 1000 takedown notifications by music publishers across the industry. Twitch, on its part, is feigning “disappointment” at what’s happening.

I never thought it would fall to me to say this, but seeing as the music press seemingly can’t be bothered doing its job – this is your fault, Twitch. It’s your fault that you don’t have the proper licences in place to allow users to play music in the way they want to.

You’re owned by Amazon, for goodness sake – they have a fully licensed streaming platform in Amazon Music, but they can’t be bothered putting in the correct licensing for you? It’s time that Emmett Shear, the CEO at Twitch got his finger out and told Jeff Bezos that this needs to be sorted out.

And let’s be honest here. A little bit of the blame lies with users who know that the service isn’t licensed for what they want to do, but use it for that purpose anyway. If you’re one of these, you’re in no position whatsoever to complain when a DMCA takedown is applied on your account. Actions have consequences, you know.

I don’t hold much truck for the music publishers – some of them are frankly just downright appalling in the way they do business. But they’re in the right here. It’s time for Twitch to make its mind up once and for all over whether they want musicians, DJs and the rest on the platform.

That’s the only thing that’s going to stop this…

By The Editor

Editor-in-chief at Amateur’s House.