Google-owned YouTube is beginning to crack down on Discord music bots. The search large has despatched a stop and desist to the homeowners of the favored Groovy Bot, which lets Discord customers play music from YouTube movies and is put in on greater than 16 million Discord servers. Google needs the service gone inside seven days, and Groovy is complying by shutting down its bot on August thirtieth.

“Groovy has been a huge part of my life over the past five years. It started because my friend’s bot sucked and I thought I could make a better one,” says Nik Ammerlaan, Groovy Bot proprietor, in a message saying the closure. The Groovy Bot sources music from YouTube and permits Discord customers to play and share it in servers the place the bot is put in.

Groovy Bot permits for a social listening celebration on Discord, largely utilizing the audio from YouTube movies. It has turn into vastly standard over the previous 5 years, with some estimates suggesting it has greater than 250 million customers. It has now caught the eye of Google and YouTube.

“I’m not sure why they decided to send it [a cease and desist] now,” says Ammerlaan in an interview with The Verge. “They probably just didn’t know about it, to be honest.” Ammerlaan admits Groovy Bot has been a “huge weight” on his shoulders over the previous 5 years, and that Google’s actions had been all the time one thing he noticed coming. “It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen,” says Ammerlaan.

While Groovy Bot helps Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, and different companies, “something like 98 percent of the tracks played on Groovy were from YouTube,” admits Ammerlaan. Google’s transfer to drive Groovy Bot offline may imply we’ll now see related motion towards different Discord bot homeowners.

Rythm, the most well-liked Discord music bot, continues to be standing sturdy… for now. “We don’t currently plan to shut down,” a Rythm bot co-owner, Jet, wrote in a message to its group of customers. Rythm is put in on almost 20 million Discord servers and says it has greater than 560 million customers consequently.

We tried to achieve out to one of many homeowners of Rythm, however after initially responding the proprietor didn’t reply to requests about whether or not Google had issued a stop and desist. If Google isn’t pleased with Groovy Bot, then it’s arduous to think about it’s going to let Rythm proceed, too.

Groovy Bot shutting down comes simply weeks after a number of YouTube video downloading websites have disappeared randomly. The elimination of this bot additionally leaves an enormous gap in Discord’s bot choices. “We take the rights of others seriously and require developers who create bots for Discord to do the same,” says a Discord spokesperson in an announcement to The Verge. “If a bot running on Discord violates someone else’s rights, that third party or Discord may take action.”

We reached out to Google to touch upon the stop and desist order towards Groovy Bot, however the firm didn’t reply in time for publication.