Twitch has become a powerhouse in the social space. As an entertainment hub, Twitch is attracting everyone from established celebrities to unknown artists, providing them a platform to build unique audiences. However, Twitch deleted tons of content that violated music copyright laws and uses a three-strike policy for its users — if you get three strikes, you’re banned and will lose all followers — and streamers were not happy, to put it politely.
Can you play music on Twitch when you stream? Yes, you are allowed, as long as you follow the Twitch music rules. But can you play Spotify on Twitch? The answer is more complex than a simple yes or no.
The short answer is no: you cannot use Spotify music on Twitch. Even if you have a Spotify subscription, this doesn’t give you the green light to play Spotify music. You’re not allowed to play music that you don’t have the rights to on Twitch. Spotify music is only licensed for personal use, and streaming it to a community not only breaks the law but also violates their terms and conditions.
However, you will occasionally find Spotify playlists that offer royalty-free tunes. Pay attention to the descriptions, ensure for yourself that the music is safe. Then you can play them on Twitch.
Here are examples of music content you are allowed to play on your Twitch stream.
Music Owned By You – Original music which was written by you and either recorded or performed live by you, and for which you own or control all rights necessary to share the music on Twitch, including the rights to the recording, performance, and to the underlying music and lyrics. Please remember that if you have a contractual relationship with an organization that controls rights to the content you create, such as a record label or publishing company, you should make sure that you are not in violation of that relationship by sharing that music on Twitch.
Music Licensed To You – Copyrighted music owned in whole or part by someone other than you, if you have secured a license to share it on Twitch from the relevant copyright holders.
Music Streamed Using Soundtrack by Twitch – Music added to your live streams using Soundtrack by Twitch. With Soundtrack by Twitch, you don’t have to worry about takedowns, but you’ll probably notice the smaller choice of tracks. This can be quite limiting, and is only available on Twitch.
As mentioned earlier, Twitch has a three-strike policy for DMCA takedowns. Your first offense results in a 24-hour ban, your second strike causes a 24-hour to seven-day ban, and your third may result in an indefinite or permanent ban on Twitch. It’s worth noting that DMCA bans are never truly removed from your record.
In addition, if you upload your recorded Twitch streams on YouTube featuring music you don’t have a license for, you risk having your content claimed or even taken down. This often leaves massive gaps in videos where there is no audio. It’s generally considered an acceptable loss by streamers. The punishment is a 24-hour ban on your channel. The long-term effects of playing copyrighted music in your streams could be channel termination.
While you cannot use standard Spotify tracks as background music for your Twitch stream, there are still some legal ways to play Spotify music on Twitch.
The Twitch DJ Program is a specialized service for live-streaming DJ performances. After joining, you can unlock a label-approved catalog of music to play in your live streamed Twitch DJ sets. Note that this is for live broadcasts only; your VODs and Clips will still be muted to protect the artists.
If you want to play songs from your Spotify playlist with the Twitch DJ Program, check the Twitch DJ Catalog and live stream only Catalog Tracks to see which songs you can safely use. And make sure to follow the Twitch DJ Program Rules.
You can find specific Spotify playlists with labels like NoCopyrightSounds (NCS), or certain artists like StreamBeats by Harris Heller, who create music free to use for content creators on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
Pro-Tip: Always verify the description of any “Copyright Free” playlist on Spotify. Ensure the curator explicitly states that the music is cleared for Twitch use, as some “free” playlists may still contain tracks that trigger the three-strike system.
Spotify Premium users can download music and podcasts for offline listening, while free users can only download podcasts. If you want to listen to your favorite songs offline with Spotify Free, all you’ll need is a powerful tool called Pazu Spotify Music Converter. It can convert Spotify content to formats like MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, M4A, and AIFF. Then you can play them on any supported device.
With the built-in Spotify web player, Pazu Spotify Converter can work at up to 10X faster speed when downloading music from Spotify. What’s more, there is no loss of audio quality during the conversion process. After conversion, it can retain ID3 tags such as Artist Name, Title, Track Number, Artist, Date, Disc Number, and other metadata information in the output audio. Follow the steps below to download Spotify music without Premium on a computer and play it anywhere.
Download, install and run Pazu Spotify Converter on your Mac or Windows. Log in your Spotify account with the built-in web player.
Click the gear icon in the top right corner. Here you can select output format (AUTO(M4A)/MP3/AAC/FLAC/WAV/AIFF), choose output audio quality, customize the output path, organize the output files in various ways, rename output files and more.
Use the integrated Spotify web player to search for the songs, albums, playlists, or podcasts you want to download.
Click the Add to list button to load all songs in the album or playlist, and uncheck the songs you don’t want to download if there are any.
Click Convert button to start downloading the Spotify songs to your local computer.
Once the conversion is done, you can find your Spotify songs downloaded as local files by clicking the folder button or directly going to the output folder you customized in the previous step. You can play them on any device without a Spotify Premium account.
Note: The free trial version of Pazu Spotify Converter enables you to convert the first three minutes of each song. You can remove the trial limitation by purchasing the full version.
Download and convert any Spotify songs, albums, playlists to MP3/M4A etc.