Sumner M. Redstone (Hon.`94) – former faculty member and chairman emeritus of CBS and Viacom, the global mass media company whose networks include MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures – developed and taught the first entertainment law course at BU Law in 1982. Redstone`s course, Law of the Entertainment Industry, covered the legal and business dynamics of the field, including antitrust, federal regulation, and production, distribution, and exhibition agreements. NoiseTrade is an online direct-to-video audio distribution platform to fans. Authors upload their original works so that users can download them for free, without digital rights management. You must have an email address and zip code to access MP3 files. To thank artists for freely sharing their work, you can give them a tip on NoiseTrade or share their music on social media to get more attention. There is one type of unauthorized streaming that could get you in trouble: peer-to-peer streaming services like BitTorrent Live. Like torrents, these services rely on users to share content. If you are a viewer, you are also a broadcaster, which violates copyright.

You can only listen to music for which you are licensed in YouTube live streams. But even if you have the license, you have to go through another step for YouTube to allow it. The music owner must add your channel to their whitelist through YouTube`s content matching system, ContentID. YouTube also has a royalty-free music audio library for your live streams. In 2018, Spotify went under the radar for allegedly infringing thousands of songs produced by music company Wixen Music Publishing. Spotify was sued for streaming more than 20 percent of the songs in its library, which contains more than 30 million songs, without owning a license or paying royalties to the publisher. Around the same time, the streaming giant was accused by Bob Gaudio and Bluewater Music Services Corporation of failing to comply with intellectual property guidelines and circumventing the payment of mechanical licenses for music streamed on Spotify. Services like Spotify emerged to legally fill the void left by Napster, but found it tedious to negotiate the range of licenses required to offer music to their paid and non-paying subscribers. That`s where MMA comes in. One of the central elements of the law was to streamline this process in order to facilitate the acquisition of rights by providers and the payment of rights holders.

“The new law closes a `loophole` in criminal copyright, where acts of reproduction or distribution that violated sanctions resulted in penalties, while violating public performance (such as streaming) was just misdemeanors,” international law firm Perkins Cole reported on jdsupra.com. Even if you respect copyright, you should still follow the rules of the platform you are streaming on when using music that is not your own. Some platforms have their own audio libraries that allow you to select songs or create your own royalty-free works. When you select a song from one of these audio libraries, always confirm that it is really correct. If it doesn`t and you play it anyway, the copyright claim goes to you, not the platform. You can only listen to music in a Facebook livestream if you have the license to do so. If Facebook thinks you`re listening to copyrighted music on your show, Facebook mutes your audio. If you do this repeatedly, Facebook can delete your videos. Background music adds that something to your livestream. This helps you set the tone for your show and makes it more appealing to viewers.

Before you start browsing the playlists of your favorite artists to find the perfect track for a live stream, you need to understand the legal requirements for using someone else`s music. Taylor`s class couldn`t be more contemporary. In 2020, the Copyright Royalty Board increased the fees that streaming services would have to pay to songwriters and publishers for the use of their musical works. The services – Spotify, Amazon, Google and Pandora – then challenged the new tariffs in court, saying they had not been properly informed of the increase. And in early 2021, musicians staged protests at more than 30 Spotify offices around the world, demanding more transparency in the company`s business model and more money per stream. If you want to add music to your live stream, you have three options: If people want to listen to one of their favorite tracks these days, they only have to activate one of the music streaming services like Spotify or Tidal. These services are not only relatively cheap and easily accessible, but also offer the listener a gigantic music library that contains a huge collection of songs. As these apps have led to the transformation of the digital music market by becoming the music listening platforms, strict regulations have been put in place to avoid music piracy and copyright infringement. StreamBeats is a website where you can download royalty-free music in different genres for streaming on YouTube and Twitch. StreamBeats started as a YouTube playlist created by musician Harris Heller to help streamers find great music and avoid DMCA claims. The YouTube channel has been updated to streambeats.com where you can find a variety of playlists to use as background music in your streams. There`s no doubt that adding music to your live stream will enhance it no matter what genre you`re streaming in.

It`s also possible to add quality music to your stream if you follow the rules and look for music that is allowed to be used legally. With our tips above, you can (legally) find good music for your livestream in no time. Of course, streaming is just a relatively new source of revenue for artists. Cordaro Rodriguez (`12), a classmate of Taylor`s who is a member of the musical quartet Sons of Serendip, says his band had 1.3 million streams on Spotify in 2020. More than 350,000 people in 91 different countries listened to his music. Independent musicians have the ability to negotiate their terms when licensing their streaming revenue. If you`re working with a licensing company or streaming platform, they may already have fees in place, or they`re negotiating on your behalf, so take the time to review their checkout process. Of course, you can play original music you`ve created in live streams. But what is considered “original”? A cover is a version of another song that does not use elements of the original.