“Can confirm there was a huge list of songs there as recently as late November. But these, too, were subject to muting as its catalog evolved. The curated collection of 500 songs was first made available in 2015 to use in the background of streams for free. Twitch had once offered a royalty-free music library as a way to combat the problem. Penalized with a 90-day streaming ban, the livelihoods of streamers are ultimately controlled by an algorithm.
“We’re aiming to seamlessly connect two industries.”įor those attempting to make a living off of streaming platforms, a strike on their account could be disastrous.
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Livestreams are similarly scanned for third-party content, something that can result in a full copyright strike and the deletion of an account once a user reaches three strikes. Since 2007, YouTube has relied on an algorithmic system known as Content ID to police copyright on the platform, a system that works by comparing a database of copyrighted video and audio to newly uploaded videos. Today, the average streamer has grown accustomed to the arcane rules of copyright law that can result in muted Twitch channels and temporary YouTube bans. Yet, while streaming culture has only grown in the years that have passed since Monstercat’s launch, copyright policies have not evolved alongside it. “Just as EDM was on the rise, monetization of content was on the rise, e-sports was on the rise, and streaming,” Johnson says. Started in 2011 by Mike Darlington and Ari Paunonen, two university students who began the company in an effort to help distribute music made by their friends, Monstercat has come to represent the era when it was conceived - what Johnson refers to as a time when streaming culture was first coming into its own. With a $5 monthly subscription, creators can stream these tunes in the background of their content across YouTube, Twitch, and Mixer, while keeping all of the revenue for themselves. Monstercat signs artists on a track-by-track basis, resulting in a discography of over 2,000 songs across 29 genres of music, from drum & bass through to indie dance tunes and happy hardcore. Perhaps best known for its work with Marshmello - who made his Monstercat debut in 2016 with the single “Alone,” which led to the studio’s first platinum record the following year - the digital label is a cultivator of new tracks, a producer and distributor of online tunes, but it’s also synonymous with influencer management, video game streaming, and the philosophizing of copyright politics. Where traditional music labels rely on copyright law to keep licensed tunes out of content creator videos and streams, Monstercat has built a small EDM empire explicitly for them.
The office is part streamer paradise - a land of leather beanbag chairs, friendly office dogs, and Twitch streamed live on giant screens - and part music producer haven featuring a large recording studio for a rotating cast of musicians, singers, and electronic artists. “We’re aiming to seamlessly connect two industries: music and gaming,” Johnson tells me from the sprawling Monstercat studio. On a quiet street in Vancouver, Canada, independent EDM record label Monstercat is carving out a solution to a problem that has plagued gamers and content creators for more than a decade: can streaming culture and the music industry coexist in a world where algorithms are used to track down unlicensed tunes, strip audio from videos, and dole out bans to streamers? Gavin Johnson, head of gaming at Monstercat, believes there can be a middle ground.
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