YouTube Has Killed Groovy Bot, Discord’s Best-Kept Secret

Google-owned YouTube is lastly cracking down on Discord’s Groovy music bot, which had sourced and performed music from the streaming platform on greater than 16 million servers for years proper below its nostril.

Since its creation practically 5 years in the past, Groovy Bot had allowed customers to converge on Discord for listening events, aggregating music from platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Deezer, Apple Music, and Tidal. But as Groovy’s founder, Nik Ammerlaan, admitted to The Verge on Tuesday, “something like 98 percent of the tracks played on Groovy were from YouTube,” a indisputable fact that apparently went unnoticed by the streaming large till just lately.

“I’m not sure why they decided to send it [a cease and desist] now,” Ammerlaan informed The Verge. “They probably just didn’t know about it, to be honest.”

Ammerlaan added that Groovy Bot has been a “huge weight” on his shoulders over the previous 5 years and that he had lengthy anticipated authorized motion from YouTube’s guardian firm, Google. “It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen,” he mentioned.

In a message announcing the bot’s closure, Ammerlaan mentioned that Groovy would formally finish its service on August 30, and that premium subscribers could be receiving a refund within the coming weeks.

In a press release to The Verge, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed that it had taken motion in opposition to Groovy over phrases of service violations, which included “modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes.”

Although Google’s stop and desist has meant curtains for Groovy, comparable Discord music bots like Octave, Hydra, and Chip nonetheless appear to be secure—for now, not less than. Rythm—which is presently run on greater than 10 million servers, making it essentially the most widely-used Discord music bot by far—can be nonetheless up and operating, though it’s secure to imagine that its days could also be numbered at this level.

The authorized motion in opposition to Groovy comes amid a flurry of shutdowns of YouTube video downloading websites, which might be a possible indication that the platform—and the RIAA—are more and more in search of to get litigious on the subject of third-party ventures that violate its phrases of service.