Facebook streamers, it’s time to double-check your background music and look into some copyright free songs.
Two years ago, Facebook Gaming announced a historic deal with the music industry, giving streamers the ability to use millions of the most popular songs as background music during their livestreams. One of the major publishers, Kobalt Music Publishing, has announced it’s pulling its library of 700,000 songs from Facebook and Instagram after they failed to agree on a deal, according to Music Business Worldwide.
A memo obtained by MBW states:
“Over the course of several months, we’ve worked diligently and in good faith to come to an agreement covering a new license for Kobalt’s repertoire. Unfortunately, fundamental differences remained that we were not able to resolve in your best interests, and as a result Kobalt’s repertoire is in the process of being removed from Meta’s services, including Facebook and Instagram, in the United States.”
This isn’t a closed door though, as the memo iterates their full desire to continue working with Meta to reach an agreement they deem fair. There’s no telling if or when that’ll happen as we’ve seen stalemates between Music and other streaming sites like Amazon’s Twitch.
That’s Not All, Folks
Unfortunately for Facebook streamers, that’s not all in the woes of stream safe music on Facebook. Epidemic Sound is suing Meta due to the rampant copyright violations occurring on their platforms Facebook and Instagram. The lawsuit claims Meta stored hundreds of Epidemic Sound’s tracks and let users download, stream, and add them to their videos. Their music was used in “millions of videos” that have been watched “billions of times”.
These stories spell trouble for a lot of Facebook Gaming streamers who’ve grown accustomed to the luxury of having access to millions of copyright songs, something Twitch and YouTube streamers are without. Sure, Kobalt is not the only music publisher on the planet, but now Facebook streamers will have to sift through their music to figure out which ones are published by Kobalt and remove them from their playlist. Not exactly a quick and easy task. It may be easier to find some stream safe music and stick with that instead of rolling the dice.
There’s Hope
It’s not all doom and gloom though, as Meta does seem keen on working it out with big Music. While all of this was going down, it was announced that Facebook will directly share a proportion of ad revenue with music rightsholders for user-generated videos. Will that make music publishers happy? Clearly it wasn’t enough for Kobalt. We’ll see if other music publishers will be satiated or walk out with Kobalt.
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