Say goodbye to your tracks: the Groovy Discord bot is gone

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• Say goodbye to your tracks: the Groovy Discord bot is gone

The Groovy bot has provided countless hours of music to gamers' Discord chat rooms, but that might be coming to an end. Google's YouTube platform has issued a cease and desist order to the bot's creator, PCGamer reports. Discord provides serious ways to connect with friends, family, and even coworkers. Custom bots can provide additional functionality to the platform, and Nik Ammerlaan made the Groovy bot a convenient way to add music to chat channels. The Groovy bot allows users to request songs and have the bot create a queue. It pulls audio from various audio and video streaming platforms, including YouTube, and then plays that audio on the Discord voice channel. The problem: Groovy didn't serve ads that generated revenue for the actual content providers. In the case of YouTube content, this is a violation of Google's terms of service, modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes, a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. The Groovy bot service has been installed on more than 16 million servers, but this all ends on August 30. The Groovy creator plans to comply with the cease and desist order and terminate his service on August 30.

The end of the Groovy robot

The creator of the Groovy bot admitted to The Verge that the vast majority of tracks played through the bot were from YouTube, so while the service also supports audio from Spotify, Soundcloud, and more, it will not attempt to rely on these services to continue operating. . Ammerlaan plans to issue refunds to anyone with a paid subscription that extends past the August 30 service deadline. For Google, the move makes sense. Discord has become a high value company offering services that directly compete with some of Google. The company has been valued at around €10 billion and is expected to be taken over by Microsoft. It would make no sense for Google to allow this competing service to offer features that exploit Google's resources without any compensation to Google. For now, Discord users can turn to the Rhythm bot, which is still operational. But, with Google's crackdown on the little Groovy bot, it may only be a matter of time before the Rhythm bot gets the same treatment. If all the bots are gone, maybe we can all just grab USB mics and make our own music on Discord.