As many of you know, we used to have music built into Dank Memer itself. Now, we own a separate bot that does music as it's primary function. This article will go into details on what's changed since our last announcement on the death of Dank Memer's music functionality, and what's great about our new system.

What happened to Dank Memer's music?

Dank Memer, and most other Discord bots, used YouTube as the primary audio source for music functionality. For many reasons, YouTube reigns supreme in this area. Between the possibility of streaming audio itself, and the VAST array of audio choices on the platform, no other platform comes close to offering what YouTube does.

For instance, SoundCloud streams audio but has extremely limited choices in what that audio is. Spotify has a MASSIVE library of songs, but they don't have an API to stream audio from. (Any bots with Spotify integrations are almost certainly using Spotify links/searches resolved to YouTube audio streams)

Well one fateful day, YouTube starting cracking down on "automated" usage, such as Discord bots. Some of you might remember that at the time, nearly EVERY Discord bot had struggled with getting API banned or ratelimited. This continues to this day, but more on this later.

For us, music had barely taken off. We never had too many more than 200 audio streams at once, and while that may sound like a lot, remember that Dank Memer is on nearly 1.7 million servers, so that's statistically unimportant. Due to all this, we decided our time would be better spent working on new things, rather than working on trying to get around YouTube's restrictions. So alas, music was disabled indefinitely.

Why do you have Octave?

Octave was previously known as "Gnar", and has been around since even before Dank Memer. It's an old bot, and was on ~160,000 servers when we acquired it. We hadn't originally planned on dipping our toes into the music bot world, but a perfect situation rose from the ashes.

Gnar was having trouble keeping users, and was losing money to hosting costs. The developers has things happening in their lives that prevented them from giving Gnar the TLC that it deserved, and were struggling. I've known Xevryll for a while now, and saw this struggle.

Gnar was under threat of shutting down, they were severely lacking in their ability to pay server costs, and I decided to step in. Rather than just financially support Gnar, we bought it entirely. We came to terms on price, and immediately announced the deal publicly before I even had a team ready to work on the bot.

A big reason Dank Memer is the 6th largest bot on Discord, is not because of our features themselves, but how we've marketed ourselves over the years, and how we've ran our bot in regards to the community. I knew then, and still know now, I can turn Gnar around into something bigger and wonderful.

Why was it renamed?

Well frankly, lets look at it from a simplistic view.

You're searching Google for "discord music bots". You see lots of results on the first page including bots such as Rythm, Groovy, and Jukebot. At the bottom of the page, you also see a bot named "Gnar", with a character from League of Legends as it's avatar. Being realistic, looking for a music bot, there's no way in hell you'd choose "Gnar" over other bots unless you really cared about LoL. And this is exactly why we've rebranded.

Octave is a common music term, and the new logo is a very simple and easy to understand design. You take one look at this bot without reading the description, and you know exactly what this bot is for now.

What makes you think you can grow this bot?

Well, we already are!

On average, Gnar was LOSING servers each day overall. Since we've rebranded it, we gain on average 1000-2000 servers PER DAY. This is nearly as high as Dank Memer's growth itself, and the bot itself is 10x smaller!

We hired a great developer Kodehawa, who is well known for owning another large Discord bot: Mantaro

Since grabbing the bot at the start of February, we've already gained over 10,000 new servers, and fixed a TON of bugs that were plaguing the bot before us.

The previous developers really cared about Gnar, but they just didn't have the time or resources to keep it up anymore, and we do.

What makes Octave special?

Those of you who remember Dank Memer's music functionality, will know exactly the type of quality we'll be bringing to Octave.

As of writing this, we're still working on what exactly premium will look like. However, it'll be the most free and open large music bot on the market.

Custom playlists, bassboost, volume control, and more. ALL free for anyone to use. There will still be premium perks, but they will be nowhere near restrictive as what you see on other music bots on Discord.

How do I add Octave?

You can visit this link for a direct link to adding the bot to all your servers.

Alternatively if you'd like to learn more about the bot, you can visit it's website or the official Discord Server.