Within the Digital Age, music has flourished immensely. Bands and songs have taken the global stage and has set records that would normally be unprecedented. However, with streaming services being available and the internet being free, songs that would normally fall behind mainstream music would suddenly become famous due to just random chance and luck. And songs can remain the Top 100 songs for such a long time as well because of it. However, with the invention of the internet came a whole lot of laws in order to preserve the artist’s ownership to their own music. We have seen many copyright controversies in services including Youtube, Spotify, and even Twitch.

Youtube has many videos uploaded to their site by the minute, to the point that they have bots look over every single video. They also ask their community members to report any videos that goes against their Terms of Service. They instituted a Copyright Law on their videos that takes down certain videos that have clips of music that is considered against Fair Use. This has been controversial, because of their next policy, and that is copyright strikes. Anyone can copyright strike someone else if they think that said video has went against Fair Use. There have been multiple instances of unfair copyright strikes from other uses and even companies that don’t own the music. Youtube itself has even went against their own Fair Use policies. The most controversial instance was when an artist got copyrighted by a separate company for his music that he owned, and could not fight them cause of the way the system works. It has not been resolved entirely, but users have been fighting back by suing Youtube.

Spotify is a music streaming service that has been used by many globally. There have been many controversies surrounding the site, despite their many efforts. Copyright laws have been resolved thankfully, but there have been many instances of Spotify not paying artists enough for the listens on their albums. There have been several lawsuits and people suing in order to have proper pay. Even still, the artists have not been paid enough due to Spotify needing some form of income. It is a double-edged sword. While Spotify gives artists the limelight, they also take pay from them.

Twitch recently came under fire for their DMCA issue, that states that copyrighted music will put a strike on said Twitch channel. While Twitch is not a good source of attention for music, musical games are, and have generated a good source of revenue for the company and spotlight for certain artists. This DMCA issue complete blocks musical games, decreasing their own revenue in turn. Its supposed to increase their own revenue due to DMCA strikes giving them money, but has hurt many streamers, and pissed many more off in turn. This DMCA issue is still in place, unfortunately.