After forcing the Groovy Discord music robot to go offline a few weeks ago, YouTube, which is affiliated with Google, is now focusing its attention on Rythm. The search giant has issued a stop order to the owners of Rythm, a bot that allows Discord users to play music in YouTube videos, and is used by more than 560 million people.
Google hopes that the Rythm robot will be shut down within seven days, and the service will be shut down completely on September 15 in order to comply with regulations. Rythm is currently installed on more than 20 million Discord servers. Rythm has more than 560 million Discord users, which makes this closure a huge blow to Discord’s core functions.
Yoav, the creator of the Rythm robot, admitted in his Discord message to The Verge: We know this will happen eventually. That’s why we started researching new things a year ago. The Groovy incident just means it happened earlier, not later.
Yoav said that the Rythm robotics team is developing new things in the music field, and we are very excited about it. There will be some form of connection with Discord, but the team is not ready to talk more about their upcoming project. Rythm is a full-time job for Yoav. It uses 16 servers with more than 4TB of memory and more than 1,000 CPU cores to drive the Discord music robot, showing how popular this service has become.
Yoav said: I believe we have received this letter now. In the next few weeks, all music robots will also receive this letter. I firmly believe that all robots will be shut down. As someone who used Discord in the early days, It’s hard to imagine Discord without a music robot. They have become the key to the experience, bringing a lot of fun and participation to the community. For everyone on the platform, this is the sad end of an era.
Although music bots may feel like a core part of Discord, they have been enabled by third parties for many years, enabling Discord to avoid censorship or legal actions from companies such as YouTube. The closure of Groovy and Rythm will force many Discord users to look for alternatives, but if small robot developers try to fill this huge gap, they may soon fall into a similar situation.
