Because the bots pulled from YouTube, the library wasn’t as vast or polished as Spotify or Apple Music.īut because YouTube is selective about its copyright crackdowns, you could almost always listen to what you wanted to hear. Friends or strangers could hang out in voice channels together, requesting songs for the bot to pull from YouTube in real time, like a virtual venue with an accessible jukebox. At the forefront was Rythm, a 5-year-old startup whose Patreon claims is “creating the future of music listening.” Along with a few other upstarts, Rythm built a bot that could be integrated into Discord servers. Despite the content ID power plays of recording industry giants (good luck finding an unofficial Kanye song) and the advent of subscription service YouTube Music, the company either can’t or has chosen not to crack down on the expansive library of streamable music.īecause YouTube offers free access to a theoretically limitless collection of songs that lack a video component, it provided an ideal database for innovative A.I. A search for your favorite LP plus the keywords “FULL ALBUM” will find you what you’re looking for, even if the tracks are broken up into playlists featuring uploads from different users - or the entire ABBA’s Greatest Hits plays back in Swedishly demonic half-speed to duck the algorithm. Since the dawn of the video platform that Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006, YouTube has been a cesspool of blatant copyright infringement.

It’s all fun and games until the cease and desist hits. Will Hagle wants you to know that today is also capitalism’s fault. Support our tireless team of writers championing one of the last great sources of independent music journalism by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon.

Free discord music bot