There’s little doubt as to the major trend in DJing in 2020 – the huge explosion in livestreamed DJ sets. We’ve discussed this phenomenon here on the blog before, but some time on, things are gradually evolving.

The most popular platforms for most people remain Facebook and Instagram, largely because that is where people have an audience, often built and developed over many years. The problems there remain the same as before – copyright takedowns mid-stream are a constant threat unless you have been whitelisted (which seems to be a phenomenon amongst certain high profile DJ accounts on Instagram).

Instagram are widely believe to have instituted a “90 second” rule, and have blogged about their rules and restrictions here. In my experience, Instagram livestreams are often taken down before 90 seconds of the offending song have been played. Which makes the adverts that they have done which prominently feature DJ livestreams a bit… well, maybe a bit misleading.

While Facebook is trigger-happy in ending livestreams, they do seem responsive to allowing the videos to remain online after the fact if you contest the copyright claim – I have generally written something like “Fair use of music, not using whole track, and as part of a DJ performance” when contesting the copyright strike, and almost all of those claims have been dropped. This obviously doesn’t stop the livestream being ended in the first place, so that doesn’t really fix the key issue!

Mixcloud Live is very much a work-in-progress, and has almost no natural audience – it relies on you being able to get people to click through. It also has various logistical issues vs other forms of streaming that make it less appealing – my laptop sounded like it was about to explode when I tried it. Running OBS and Serato at the same time on the same computer is not ideal! Zoom appears to be a popular platform for private DJ sets – be they birthdays, or corporate events for companies that are working from home during the lockdown.

The emerging favourite for DJs seems to be Twitch. It has traditionally been a gamer’s favourite, and from the DJ perspective, the experience is light years ahead of the competition in many ways. Fantastic video and audio quality, great chat functionality, a brilliant mobile app, and much more besides. From the start of the lockdowns, it was clear in their terms of service that DJ sets were against the rules. However, they appeared to actively begin to court DJs and musicians, clearly seeing the possibly huge new audience numbers that could be brought to their platform. They are owned by Amazon, so they could almost certainly thrash out a publishing deal with the labels should they choose to.

Then this week, news emerged of a huge batch of DMCA takedowns against archived content. DJs around the world had a collective minor freak-out, but now that the dust is settling, maybe things aren’t as bad as feared. Twitch tweeted out the following

“This week we’ve had a sudden influx of DMCA takedown requests from 2017-2019. If you’re unsure about rights to audio in past streams, we advise removing those clips. We know many of you have large archives, and we’re working to make this easier.

This is the first time we have received mass DMCA claims against clips. We understand this has been stressful for affected creators and are working on solutions, including examining how we can give you more control over your clips.

We adhere to the DMCA, which requires that we take action on content and streamer accounts upon notice from rights holders, as happened this week. Our guidelines for this have not changed, please reference here“

For more about the DMCA, check this Medium article.

Others took up the discussion, with this insight from Billy Lane.

UK underground stalwart Plastician had this to say on the topic – explaining that, ultimately, this is to do with labels choosing how their content should be used and monetised.

So the long and short of it seems to be that, for now, DJs are relatively safe to continue on Twitch. It was always a dubious legal position over copyright and DJ sets on that platform, and it remains so. Videos don’t appear to be getting stopped mid-flow – which means it has a huge advantage over Facebook and Instagram. Old content may be targeted, and need to be removed – not ideal if you have a big archive which you like to use as a kind of “showreel” to potential bookers and clients. But, at time of writing, the initial wave of panic seems a little unjustified, and the doom-mongers who declared “Twitch is over!” may be a little premature in that judgement.

It is possible that this is the thin end of the wedge, and the scope of takedowns will increase – at which point this becomes far more urgent for the DJ community that is developing on Twitch.

But for now, Twitch remains a very viable option if you are prepared to put the work in to develop a following on the platform. Come and follow my channel here, and go grab the latest heat for your sets from the Heavy Hits pool!