Why Is YouTube Taking Down Popular Discord Music Bots?

The popular streaming platform, YouTube, has been on a takedown spree. Google and YouTube, in particular, have forced popular Discord music bots to shut down within the past two weeks. The tech giant sent a desist to the owners of the popular Groovy bot in the last week of August. Following that, the owners of the popular Rhythm bot faced the same fate.

If you’re a Discord user, there’s a solid chance that you’ll come across a music streaming bot. Likewise, the said bots are prevalent and widely used. Groovy and Rythm are among the most popular music streaming bots globally that enable users to listen to music together on a discord server.

Meanwhile, you can also read our in-depth article on Discord text formatting guide here!

The End Of The Discord Music Bots Era

YouTube sent a notice to the respective owners of the Groovy and Discord bots. Groovy complied with the notice and finally shut down on August 30th. Further, the Rythm Discord bot owners received a similar notice and complied with YouTube by shutting down the bot on September 15th.

The Rythm bot had been out in the wild longer than Groovy had. Rythm is currently installed on 20 million Discord servers and features over 560 million Discord users. Similarly, Groovy was installed on 16 million Discord servers and featured over 250 million users.

Music streaming bots allow listening parties on Discord servers, mostly using audio from YouTube videos. This caught the attention of Google and YouTube and received notice. Also read: How to Add Bots to Discord Servers and Configure Them?

The primary reason behind YouTube taking down these music bots is that both bots offer a premium subscription that offers a tad bit of extra features on Discord. As Google confirmed to The Verge, Google took down Groovy as it violated its Terms of Service, including modifying the service to use it for commercial purposes. The same could be the reason behind the shutting down of the Rythm bot.

Both the Groovy and Rythm Discord bots have issued a public notice regarding their closure. Moving forward, it is not certain if YouTube will allow entirely free music bots to function or bring its own integration into Discord for listening and watching parties. It is also possible that other bots that offer a premium subscription will follow the path of Groovy and Rythm bots. Also, check out our article the list of the best YouTube alternatives you can use for free in 2022.