Google is shutting down Discord’s popular Groovy music bot, claiming the software runs afoul of subsidiary YouTube’s Terms of Service. Discord is an instant messaging and digital distribution platform for creating communities. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers”. In these servers was a space created for Bots like Groovy music bot which performed specified tasks on their own helping in managing the large number of members of the server.
Groovy specifically played music sourcing from the streaming platform, Youtube. The music bot is 5 years old and added to 16 Million Discord servers with hundreds of millions of users.
Groovy’s founder, Nik Ammerlaan, admitted on Tuesday, “something like 98 percent of the tracks played on Groovy were from YouTube,” a fact that apparently went unnoticed by the streaming giant until recently.
A sort of music aggregate service, Groovy lets users gather for online listening parties, playing music from major services like YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Deezer, Apple Music, and TIDAL. There’s a catch, though. Since most of those platforms don’t allow direct audio playback, Groovy inputs metadata into YouTube to find the closest equivalent to your intended track.
Google confirmed 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.
Google wants the service gone within seven days, and Groovy is complying by shutting down it’s bot on August 30th.
(image credits: Wikimedia Common)
