Fans on the official Twitch game stream waiting to enjoy the Metallica virtual game performance in BlizzCon, Blizzard’s annual gaming convention, on Friday I heard something that, uh, definitely wasn’t Metallica.
As told by The Verge, viewers on many platforms, including Blizzard’s Twitch and YouTube channels, were successful with the song “For Whom The Bell Tolls. “ However, for some strange reason, the official gaming channel Twitch decided to totally change the vibe right after the song started. Cut Metallica and replaced with … something else.
Check it out for yourself.
Now, it took me a while to find the words to describe this song that is not from Metallica. At first, it felt like Christmas. So I thought it was angelic, but not really. A colleague at Gizmodo suggested it sounded like a remix of Legend of Zelda music, which definitely made more sense. But that raises the question, it’s not Weird play music that sounds like Blizzard’s competitors?
That still doesn’t solve the mystery of which song Twitch has replaced Metallica. After scratching my head, I had an “aha!” moment and Shazamed that. According to Shazam, the song in question is “Toys in Space” by Ecobel. A visit to Epidemic Sound, who manages Ecobel’s music, quickly tells me that this artist is “environmental”, “floating”, “dreamer” and “hopeful”. It definitely doesn’t remind me of Metallica.
Now, the other question: why would Twitch do that? It looks like it was a problem related to Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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“The next musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder,” read the message in another stream of complete performance with an introduction of the band just before.
In other words, Blizzard probably obtained the musical rights for its own channels, but not Twitch channels. Gizmodo contacted Twitch to find out what happened. We will make sure to update this blog if we receive a response.
That sounds like a big hiccup on the part of Twitch, which we imagine we desperately tried to resolve your lack of rights by playing “Toys in Space”. I have to say: it was certainly memorable.