How do I not receive copyright notices on Twitch? Try SpotifySynchronizer

In response to the waves and waves copyright claims shot at Twitch streamers for more than a year, a developer has come up with a smart workaround for gamers who want to play copyrighted jams on the Amazon-owned streaming site.

Enter SpotifySynchronizer, an extension created by Twitch developer Peter Frydenlund Madsen, aka small0, which does pretty much what its name suggests: it syncs Spotify tracks from a streamer that play a particular game with the Spotify account of people who watch that stream. The result? Viewers can listen to the same music played by their favorite Twitch streamers, without any copyrighted tracks playing without permission from an artist or record company.

In one interview with TorrentFreak, Pequeno0 explained that he got the idea to watch Grand Theft Auto streams who were among the hardest hit by the recent flood of copyright infringement strikes lobed against Twitch by the biggest record companies. “It is in fact with them in mind that I started the project”, he said. says TorrentFreak in an interview, noting that Spotify was the natural fit to create a tool like this. Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming platforms, with more than 150 million regular Spotify users accessing the service regularly, including Pequeno0 itself. In addition to that, he added, Spotify also has a public set of development tools this made it easier to configure the extension he was considering.

Here is how it works: IIf the Twitch streamer wants to play a certain set of songs in the background of their gameplay, they can connect their personal Spotify account to this add-on, which shows which song is currently looping. Anyone watching this feed can open this extension, which open their own Spotify account on their own device, to play the same tracks repeatedly on the streamer’s Spotify account. Because Spotify is the one playing the song on either end, that means the artists are always getting paid (a little anyway.)

It’s a pretty sleek system, but not without its fair share of technical issues. Pequeno0 described that it was difficult to get the respective APIs from Twitch and Spotifys to play well together, hence the need to make this extension a pop-up, rather than a tool directly integrated into a Twitch platform itself. And if a streamer chooses to change tracks in the middle of a song, a viewer may need to “force” their Spotify accounts to sync in order to change tracks with them.

Pequeno0 also told TorrentFreak that “if the extension becomes very popular” he is ready to extend it to other music streaming services, such as SoundCloud or Pandora Radio. “It could be extended to use even more services, and maybe even search for songs on different music services, so that the viewer / streamer can use different services but listen to the same songs,” he said. Considering how some popular artists have cut exclusive offers with some of Spotify’s competitors, adding more streaming services can only mean more sick beats for the rest of us.