Discord used to be more lawless. For years, music bots roamed freely on servers and group DMs." They were delivering ad-free audio from YouTube videos on command, without bothering with lofty concerns such as "licensing" or "probably illegal.

Unsurprisingly, Discord's music bot lived on borrowed time, as in 2021 Google issued cease-and-desist letters to popular music bot developers for violating YouTube's terms of service and "using it for commercial purposes." . That's true. Unfortunately, it's hard to argue against it.

Among the bots eliminated in the massive music bot purge was Rythm, which boasted some 30 million users on 20 million Discord servers at the time of its death in September 2021. Rythm hasn't been eliminated since August, when Google brought the hammer down on Groovy, another very popular music bot, and Yoav Zimet, the creator of Rythm, told The Verge that the developers were "working on something new" before that axe fell.

Nearly three years later, Zimet's foreshadowing is coming to fruition; Rythm has risen from the dead, not as a rogue bot harvesting and selling YouTube audio, but as, according to a press release, "the world's first community-based group listening music platform," it was relaunched today as "the world's first community-based group listening music platform. In other words, if you can use Spotify while on a Discord call with others, that's what Spotify is like. Currently, one of Discord's built-in activities, Rythm, provides music synchronized to the server and voice calls, but requires a group to listen.

Clearly, Rythm has been chasing music licensing deals and venture capital investments for the past three years. That sounds like the worst three years someone could spend, but it means your old music bot friend has gone legit. Of course, legality comes at a cost: to host free listening sessions from Rythm's music library, you have to pay $5 a month for a premium subscription to Rythm. Otherwise, free users can only listen to premium friends' sessions or to radio stations pre-curated by Rythm and premium subscribers. [But what will make or break the revived Rythm will be how well its music catalog of about 50 million songs, according to the press release, will provide music that people will actually want to seek out. Frankly, that 50 million song number is already more than I would have guessed; Spotify's catalog is around 100 million songs. And I never got a DMCA from Google for stealing a bit of music.

Sadly, if I wanted to use Rythm for solo listening, I could only get a couple minutes of music. curious to see what kind of heat Rythm would bring, I launched a new Discord activity on the test server to see what was available. I selected a curated radio station called "Sad Songs" and listened to two and a half songs by Lana Del Rey and another by an artist called "Juice WRLD.

"Rythm is for groups," a pop-up said." You can keep adding songs and playback will continue when someone arrives."

According to the Rythm website, even premium members cannot listen alone. By making group listening a requirement, the company is able to offer this service "at a lower price than other music streaming services."

Oh well. If you have friends, you can launch Rythm on Discord today; Rythm also hopes to launch a standalone mobile app later this year.