Twitch Launches Free Music Library; Branches Into Music Broadcasting

In August last year, popular game-streaming service, Twitch started scanning streams for copyrighted music. This resulted in a massive backlash from viewers. Reason being, a stream replete with commentary and music suddenly being reduced to just video made for a lacklustre viewing experience.

Thankfully, this is about to change. The company has announced Music Library. It contains 500 songs that can be used while live-streaming your video gaming adventures to the rest of the world, or simply to add to an existing archive. Twitch has partnered with music labels such as Fools Gold, Monstercat, and Mad Decent to do so.

This is somewhat in-line with what YouTube gives its users, that is, access to music with copyright permissions through its agreements with record labels. Using these tracks will ensure videos will not be flagged and muted in streams.

Taking things further into the realm of music, the company also announced a music category that is currently in beta. What this does is let musicians use Twitch for creating, performing, and presenting original music.

"Artists such as Deadmau5, Steve Aoki, Porter Robinson, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, and many others have already turned to Twitch to launch channels to play games. With the beta Music category, they are now able to make music a part of their Twitch presence," the company said on its blog.

It marks an expansion and diversification of the service into other segments since Amazon purchased it last year in a heated bidding war, but whether it gains significant traction or not remains to be seen.