Google-owned YouTube is starting to crack down on Discord music bots.

The search
giant has sent a cease and desist to the owners of the popular Groovy Bot, which
lets Discord users play music from YouTube videos and is installed on more than 16
million Discord servers. Google wants the service gone within seven days, and
Groovy is complying by shutting down its bot on August 30th.

Google confirmed to The Verge that it took action in this case: “We notified Groovy
about violations of our Terms of Service, including modifying the service and using
it for commercial purposes,” a YouTube spokesperson writes, adding that its APIs
are for developers who comply with its terms of service.

“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 owner, in a message announcing the closure. The Groovy Bot
sources music from YouTube and allows Discord users to play and share it in servers
where the bot is installed.

Groovy Bot allows for a social listening party on Discord, largely using the audio
from YouTube videos. It has become hugely popular over the past five years, with
some estimates suggesting it has more than 250 million users. It has now caught the
attention of Google and YouTube.
The Groovy Bot service will end later this month.

“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 past five years, and that Google’s actions were always something he saw coming.
“It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen,” says Ammerlaan.

While Groovy Bot supports Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, and other services,
“something like 98 percent of the tracks played on Groovy were from YouTube,”
admits Ammerlaan. Google’s move to force Groovy Bot offline could mean we’ll now
see similar action against other Discord bot owners.

Rythm, the most popular Discord music bot, is still standing strong... for now. “We
don’t currently plan to shut down,” a Rythm bot co-owner, Jet, wrote in a message
to its community of users. Rythm is installed on nearly 20 million Discord servers
and says it has more than 560 million users as a result.

We tried to reach out to one of the owners of Rythm, but after initially responding
the owner didn’t respond to requests about whether Google had issued a cease and
desist. If Google isn’t happy with Groovy Bot, then it’s hard to imagine it’s going
to let Rythm continue, too.

Groovy Bot shutting down comes just weeks after several YouTube video downloading
sites have disappeared randomly. The removal of this bot also leaves a giant hole
in Discord’s bot offerings. “We take the rights of others seriously and require
developers who create bots for Discord to do the same,” says a Discord spokesperson
in a statement to The Verge. “If a bot running on Discord violates someone else’s
rights, that third party or Discord may take action.”

Update, 7:32 PM ET: Added Google’s confirmation and statement that it told Groovy
that it violates YouTube’s terms of service.
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There are 15 comments.
thepcwiz101

People should protest youtube over this. Before long YouTube is going to go after
other services that allow downloading of videos. This is clearly a money grab from
yet another greedy corporation that has too much power in america. Like this could
mean that music vc channels will not be useful anymore and in some servers where
general vc is used for everything it would result in the vc not being used as much
if youtube goes after music bots. It’s not like the bots are stealing from them or
downloading music. Sure it blocks ads but people can block whatever they want and
it isn’t gonna stop them.
Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 5:25 PM
Larry_O

People should protest youtube over this.

I agree, but also – there’s about three million other things people should be
boycotting/protesting YouTube over, too.

It’s a fucking terrible platform that is very, very much responsible for the mass-
platforming of disinformation and the radicalization of millions of folks.

People should stop using it, but again – we’re about two generations deep into an
internet that is built on the common acceptance of casual, internalized cruelty at
a ridiculous scale. So nobody’s really ever going to stop using YouTube in numbers
that would actually affect real change, because too many of us users honestly
believe it’s worth all the societal carnage it enables in exchange for being able
to watch unboxings/essays/trailers/videos/etc.

Just like the one day boycott of Twitch is going to move the needle a millimeter at
best before it swings back to the tire fire it’s always been, because the userbase
that makes these platforms the billion-earning behemoths they are, is a userbase
thoroughly acclimated to, and accepting of, all that suffering. Essentially – the
pot full of boiled frogs thinks the water is fine.

So yeah, I agree with you: People should stop using YouTube. Maybe then YouTube
would have to actually revert to being something even sorta resembling a user-
friendly experience not dependent on monetizing hot takes for the sake of
engagement and ad sales, like it was before Google bought it.

But nobody’s gonna actually do that.

Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 6:16 PM
ThePowerstar

People would if there was an equivalent. There is currently no equal to YouTube on

the video front. Even companies that have their entire business model around making
videos cough Rooster Teeth cough have a poorly optimized, garbage video player on
their site. I feel like blaming the perceived cruelty of internet users completely
disregards the actual reason no one would stop using YouTube.
Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 7:30 PM
Larry_O

People would if there was an equivalent.

Well yeah, because then they wouldn’t have to sacrifice anything (what little
"sacrifice" can be gleaned from "not watching free videos online", that is) for the
better.

Again, I’m not placing myself above the unwashed masses here. My dirty ass still
watches YouTube, i have a subscription list to the aforementioned essayists and
"Fun quirky video content" creators that’s about 20-30 channels deep. I know that
makes me complicit in the promotion of horrifying, world-damaging shit that makes
YouTube a lot of money.

But maybe an alternative would spring up in the face of people doing the right
thing in large numbers. Nobody’s going to wait for an alternative to come first,
because there’s no incentive for a real alternative to take root. Everyone’s self-
interest is better served by being where all the people already are. It’s why every
legit alternative to the major social media networks in place has – at best – found
a way towards mediocre, marginalized, mostly-ignored base-level acceptance. It’s
not success, just like Pro-Keds aren’t Nikes. They’re around, sure. But nobody
WANTS them.

Nobody’s going to stop using YouTube because nobody really wants to stop using
YouTube. It’s easier this way, and so the effort isn’t going to be spent rehabbing
YouTube, or even more cleanly – just not using it (what are we all REALLY losing by
not having instant access to all the mindless bullshit – or misinformation and
indoctrination material – the second we want it?). The effort is going to be spent
trying to justify and acclimate to the toxicity of the platform, because that’s the
path of least resistance.

Jonah Hill just gave an interview in GQ that’s going viral right now, and in the
interview, he talks about how Instagram is basically "The new smoking." And I don’t
disagree. Instagram is basically Marlboro. But YouTube is Camel, and Facebook is
Lucky Strike, and TikTok is some Cap’n Crunch flavored Vape, so on and so forth.

We’re not going to stop using YouTube because that’s how narcotic addiction works.
That’s all.
Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 8:19 PM
AndrewEB

There’s never going to be an alternative to YT, at least one that won’t do the same
shit that YT is doing. In order for a video hosting platform to be successful, it
needs a reason for people to come to that site. Sites like vid.me and blip.tv shut
down because not enough people went to the sites to make it profitable to host, at
least not without being bought out by a giant company.

And as for sites like Bitchute and Rumble, their whole schtick is going to attract
a dedicated fanbase, but it’ll never be a site that you can make a career off of,
let alone attract new viewers.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 3:33 AM
Series

The barriers of entry are too huge for there to be viable replacements anymore, any
attempt would require years and be a black hole for money, it’s why getting de-
platformed by only a few places effectively means you’re pretty much done online
now and why we should be very concerned about the actions of these companies.
Not that any alternatives would actually give the previous poster what they want,
no doubt anything popular is dripping with the ‘internalised hate’ they’re
complaining about.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 7:51 AM
Larry_O

Not that any alternatives would actually give the previous poster what they
want, no doubt anything popular is dripping with the ‘internalised hate’ they’re
complaining about.

Hmmmm
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 10:19 AM
Casin

What’s the alternative though? Say there was some imaginary other platform. How
does this platform prevent misinformation from spreading? Just have a million mods
manually reviewing every video? That’s not sustainable. How to prevent monetization
of hot takes? The alternative to ad revenue is to get people to pay for videos, and
that’s not going to happen.

I’m not saying Youtube isn’t flawed, especially with regard to oversensitive
copyright, but some of the fundamental issues wouldn’t be solved by any other
platform either.
Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 8:21 PM
Larry_O

And this is a great example of how internalized the cruelty is. We can’t even
possibly imagine there might be a way to do any of this that isn’t instinctually
inhumane. It’s not even fathomable to us. And further, even if it was fathomable –
most of us wouldn’t want it!

Even now, just at the mere hypothetical mention of a possible existence where a)
people don’t watch stupid internet videos all day or b) there’s a place to do that
but it isn’t a fucking algorithm-powered cesspit, the initial reaction is to
defensively reject it out of hand as an impossibility.

We have to keep using it, because the bitter feel-goods we get from using it is, to
us, worth the absolute horror it costs (mostly other) people.
Posted on Aug 24, 2021 | 8:24 PM
indignantgoat

We can’t even possibly imagine there might be a way to do any of this that
isn’t instinctually inhumane.

Sure we can. We can’t imagine ways to do it and make a profit.

At the end of the day, there will always be a conflict / friction between
preventing misinformation, political censorship, fair use, and IP rights.

Further, at the end of the day, platforms are going to be more concerned with
protecting themselves financially than protecting their creators from abuse or
their consumers from misinformation.

Lastly… A lot of this comes down to what happens when you have to attract a
critical mass of users in order to be sustainable, but a decent number of those
users are objectively bad people.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 10:09 AM
theratchetnclank
Why would they allow a bot to leach bandwidth from youtube without bringing in
revenue for youtube and even worse making someone else rich from youtube’s
infrastructure and resources?

There might be many issues with Google/Youtube but this isn’t one of them.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 5:45 AM
helix7

So what you are saying. Greedy Google should allow Groovy etc to make money out of
them. Groovy Bot wasn’t free, they were charging for the add-on and people were
paying money to them. We are basically talking about paid piracy here. So Google
should allow Groovy to get money from people while they were leaching their servers
and not paying anything to the artists. OK….
Posted on Aug 26, 2021 | 4:37 AM
cactws

Then they should make a music bot

Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 7:30 AM
Beskonechnost

That would be very expensive since they’d have to pay for the broadcast rights for
millions of tracks from many rights holders across the globe, potentially.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 7:52 AM
the9thlion

It was probably the rights holders that pressured YouTube into taking this bot down
in the first place. But they should make an ad supported replacement (or ad free if
linked to a premium user’s profile). Surely it’s expensive but trillion dollar
companies don’t get my sympathy especially when I’m paying them.
Posted on Aug 25, 2021 | 11:34 AM