Spotify announced Tuesday that it acquired Heardle, the music version of Wordle. Spotify sees Heardle as not only a fun game, but as a music discovery tool.
Heardle is one of the many popular daily guessing games inspired by Wordle. The app picks a random song from a pool of the top streamed songs from the last 10 years and plays a snippet of the intro. Then it’s up to you to guess what song it is. Like Wordle, you’re allotted six guesses and each wrong guess grants you a couple more seconds of the intro. Heardle was created by the digital production studio Omaske.
“We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans,” said Jeremy Erlich, Global Head of Music at Spotify in a press release. “Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs . . . and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge.”
Heardle fans, don’t worry the website and app will still be free and will stay essentially the same. The only difference will be that now you’ll have the opportunity to stream the song in its entirety on Spotify at the end of the game, whereas before it was linked to SoundCloud. But Spotify did share that they’re planning on integrating Heardle “more fully” into Spotify down the line with no further details on how they will do so.
Heardle is the second game feature Spotify has recently rolled out marking a new era of the music streaming platform. Two weeks ago it released Spotify Karaoke, which allows you to do karaoke on Spotify and rates you on your performance.
