Riot Games releases free album of no-DMCA songs streamers can use

NME

Riot Games has released a collection of free music for streamers and creators to use, called Sessions: Vi. 

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The 37-track album can be streamed from Youtube and Spotify, with similar musical projects in the works, according to Riot Games. The studio said: “Sessions is a collection of music developed in partnership with a number of talented musicians that anyone can use in their content without concern of copyright strikes.”

Riot Games wrote a post last year about what songs from the studio creators can use amid the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns taking place across Twitch. The studio doesn’t own all of the music in its games, as when working with artists and music publishers, the copyright is often not under the studio’s sole ownership.

Riot did put together a ‘creator-safe playlist’ and said in a tweet at the time “for songs that Riot does not 100% own (such as POP/STARS, Worlds Anthems, etc.) we, unfortunately, can’t grant rights to players.”

Last month (June 1), it was reported that Twitch emailed streamers to tell them that more music publishers were using automated tools to claim copyrighted music on the platform. Twitch said: “We are committed to being more transparent with you about DMCA. We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers.”

“We are actively speaking with music labels about solutions that could work for creators as well as rights holders.”

The issues surrounding DMCA online go back to May 2020, when record labels began sending out thousands of DMCA strikes. These DMCA strikes aimed at Twitch streamers archival footage to have any streams with copyrighted and owned music in them taken down.

Twitch responded by telling streamers to do two things: “1) if you play recorded music on your stream, you need to stop doing that and 2) if you haven’t already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might.”

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