In this morning, if you attempted to listen Heardle and were instead taken to the Spotify website, it wasn’t a problem. Today, Spotify revealed that it had purchased the Wordle-inspired music guessing game, which it will use to promote music discovery.
Heardle is one of several popular offshoots that have appeared in the mould of Wordle, the everyday word game that gained so much popularity that The New York Times bought it. You get the first seconds of a well-known song in the game. Congratulations, you’ve won if you can correctly identify the song within one second! If not, you get six chances to guess, and the duration of the double clip after each incorrect guess. You have 16 seconds to determine whether or not you are the music lover you believe yourself to be.
According to a press statement from Spotify, “for current Heardle players, the appearance and experience of the game will keep the same, and it’ll be free to play for everyone.” Additionally, as of right now, players can hear the entire song after the game on Spotify.
Players were urged to help support the game before it was purchased by Heardle by making contributions through the creator tipping website ko-fi. The ko-Fi page is currently inactive. Even so, certain Heardle rip-offs created by fans, such as Lorde Heardle (… a genuine wasted chance to call it “Lordle”), are still accessible online.
Wordle was purchased by the New York Times for an unknown sum in the “low seven figures,” but Spotify withheld the price of its Heardle deal. The newspaper reported in its quarterly profits that the Wordle acquisition had resulted in “tens of millions” of additional people visiting the site. Users are presented with a brief advertisement for the Spelling Bee word game from the New York Times after completing the day’s Wordle puzzle. The fact that The New York Times experienced its best period for net subscription additions to Game after its January purchase is likely no coincidence.
Though Heardle might not be as well-known as Wordle, Spotify nevertheless made a wise acquisition with it. The game’s annual desktop and mobile online visits peaked in March at 69 million, according to web traffic company Similarweb. The Heardle website received 41 million visits in the previous month.
Due to Spotify’s efforts to enhance music discovery and retain users on its app, this acquisition makes sense. Heardle has the ability to generate natural social media posts for the app, much like its well-liked Spotify Wrapped component, which this year even included a game. The hilarity has now spread to Spotify’s official Twitter account.
Spotify has purchased a number of companies in the past few years, primarily in the podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, and Podz. However, this is Spotify’s first game acquisition. Even Netflix is attempting to use gaming to bolster its own content.
