Today we mourn another Discord music bot that drew the ire of YouTube: the popular Vexera music bot has discontinued its music feature after receiving a cease and desist notice from the streaming giant.

"On July 4, we received a notice from YouTube requesting that we cease our activity of streaming audio from YouTube as part of our music feature," reads the notice on Vexera's site." YouTube is essential to our music feature and we cannot continue without it."

Vexera's music bot, like many bots before it, offered a convenient way to listen to music in sync with others via voice chat. With a simple search command, the bot searches YouTube, finds the video it is looking for, and streams its audio to everyone in the channel. According to Bexera, the bot was active on more than 3 million Discord servers.

Vexera's announcement almost perfectly replicates the downfall of Groovy, a very popular music bot (active on 16 million servers at its peak) that was shut down by Google almost two years ago. after Groovy's closure, its 16 million servers were left in the wind looking for a suitable replacement. I tried several candidates on my Discord server before settling on Vexera. Hmmm. [Neither Vexera nor Groovy has revealed exactly why YouTube threatened legal action, but in 2021 a YouTube spokesperson said Groovy violated its terms of service by "modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes." In other words, Google sees a problem with music bots bypassing YouTube's ads and offering paid premium memberships for additional features for which Google presumably receives no money.

When Groovy shut down in 2021, users thought it would spell the end of all music bots on the platform and, by extension, the end of the days of the ultra-convenient Discord salad, unmarred by business reality Worried.

Google has since been less ferocious in its persecution of music bots than might have been expected. At least one other popular bot has been removed, while others remain today.

Some thought that the introduction of Discord's officially approved YouTube Watch Together app (ad-supported) in 2022 would be the final nail in the coffin. Maybe it's because it's much easier to stream in a browser tab, but I don't know a single person who has ever used it. Perhaps the music bots that remain are only there because their footprint is too small for Google to notice.

Vexera's closure is a bitter reminder that one of Discord's best perks exists only at the whim of the mega-corporations that allow it, and while Discord itself is becoming an increasingly unwelcoming place for free users, free sharing of paid content I wonder if another feature (Go Live streaming) that allows users to share paid content for free will be next on the chopping block.