YouTube really doesn’t approve of bots that let people pull music from its platform into social platform Discord. Having recently shut down a popular bot called Groovy, now YouTube has come for the other big player in the space: Rythm. After a cease-and-desist order from YouTube, the bot will shut down on 15 September.
That’s going to affect a lot of people: according to The Verge, Rythm is installed on more than 20m Discord servers, with a notional reach of more than 560 million people.
In legal terms, the bots can’t really complain, but there is the sense of an opportunity to be taken if YouTube (or, indeed, any streaming service) can find a model in partnership with Discord to provide similar functionality.
“It’s hard to envision Discord without music bots, they’ve become key to the experience and bring so much fun and engagement to a community,” said Rythm’s creator.
This may not be the end of Rythm‘s efforts, though. “We’re not going anywhere. We’ve spent the last year working on something brand new in the music space that will revolutionize how we all listen to music,” promised the company in its shutdown message.
“We can’t share much yet, but keep Rythm in your servers and subscribe to our newsletter to get updates as we release them over the next few months.”
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