YouTube forces Discord’s Rythm Bot to shut down

Rythm Bot, the most popular music bot for Discord will be shut down as Rythm’s owners have complied to a cease and desist order from YouTube. Rythm Bot will officially shut down on September 15th, 2021 at 8:00am PST.

In service in over 20 million Discord servers, Rythm is used by 30 million users every month, which is about 1/5 of Discord’s entire active userbase.

According to Rythm’s updated website:

Even though our current service is shutting down, 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. 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.

Premium subscribers of the service that haven’t used a significant amount of their term will be refunded for their unused days. This process is expected to take place over the next 1-2 months.

The termination of Rythm Bot’s service is the second major crackdown from YouTube against Discord music bots. Less than two weeks ago, Groovy, another music bot, also met a similar fate. While it is likely that more music bots will also get a similar treatment in the future, there is a silver lining as both Discord and YouTube are working towards an alternative.