Thread by @EposVox

Let's talk about music licensing again for a brief thread:
Something that is often expressed by streamers about licensing radio-tier music is "just let me pay to license it like royalty-free stuff."
You probably could if you hunted the right avenues enough. You couldn't afford it

Your $15/mo (or whatever you deem reasonable) is the H of a H2O molecule on a drop in the bucket for music labels and publishers. A single indie movie you never see will earn them exponentially more.

Not only that, but licensing to you that cheaply would make it that much more difficult for them to charge the prices they do for big publishing licensing. They have zero reason to play ball with that.
Just doesn't work that way.
Even worse against your favor...

YOU paying them or taking a cut of YOUR earnings isn't even a good enough call. On many platforms (especially Twitch) you make a tiny % of what the platform earns from your content. Taking a cut from you is taking the smallest piece of the smallest pie they've ever seen.

No way are platforms going to give up any of their share - thus more reason labels would have no reason to just hand out licenses, either. It's genuinely a bad deal for them.

Streamers really don't like to hear this, but "big creators stay ignorant on copyright law" becomes a recurring kerfuffle every few years & it's exhausting. There's no eutopic scenario where this works out for you, without platform shelling big money tht won't protect u elsewhere

Your energy, time, and money is far better spent finding, licensing, or commissioning safe, licensed-to-you (or royalty-free) tracks and curating a playlist of them based on the licenses you've acquired and the vibes of your stream.

Obligatory "check out our stream-safe rock/metal music at backingtrack.gg " follow-up

And *outside of covers or music-focused streaming of performing the music* (for which licensing/agreements/protections exist on YouTube and are possible) if you feel your stream suffers that poorly from not playing lyric-heavy radio music... you're making bad content. Sorry.

It's honestly amusing seeing the difference in how streaming faces this issue vs YouTubers. Back in the day, everyone on YouTube believed "you can use up to X seconds & it's safe/fair use" of a show/song. This was never true, is not how fair use works, but is an EFFORT. Meanwhile

streaming's approach has just been "we should be able to play all songs all day every day screw a fair use" and it's so much worse and more sad to watch how little people get it.

https://twitter.com/Jack_Mangano/status/1437229999334039555

This is always such terrible framing.
Streaming on a mainstream, public, monetized platform is not "hanging out with your friends." If you want to do that, do that. Or have a private call.
Musician may not care if you "share with others" but they start to

care more when you're profiting from it and making additional content from it without doing the right thing.

Sure, there are plenty who don't. Plenty who mistakenly tweeted that you could use their music when you can't.
But that comes back to the fact that they won't be fairly

compensated for that kind of anything so they have no business interest in preventing you from doing so.

Regardless, they agreed to release the track under a label and the label does care - their intentions matter little.

The internet needs room for "hangout places" where this kind of thing isn't as big of a problem - think Clubhouse, big Discord calls, etc. - but that can (by definition) NEVER be big mainstream streaming sites.
That requires coordination in forums/etc. and people are lazy.