With the unexpected popularity of wordle game, many creators made their own clones. What if guessing a video game, a photograph, a movie... Anything was worth to do a daily pastime like those who did the classic daily pastimes of the newspapers. Heardle was one of the most popular.
That Heardle guy consisted of playing bits of music from popular or emerging songs, and asking the user to guess them. It was another especially popular pastime, and it also served to discover new songs. Spotify's eyes turned into dollar bags and they bought it last year, and in that year, they've decided to shut it down.
Soon you won't have your daily ration of Heardle
As of May 5, Heardle will no longer be available. Players who want to keep a record of their stats for posterity you should take a screenshotsays Spotify. Statistics will no longer be available after May 4.
Heardle emerged early last year from the massive success of Wordle. It became one of the most prominent and successful Wordle clones, peaking at 69 million monthly visitors last March. The makers of Heardle they sold the game to Spotify in July.
But just before the deal was announced, Heardle's monthly visitor numbers had dropped to 41 million. The game's popularity was already waning, which made the purchase less interesting for Spotify.
When Heardle bought it, Spotify said that he saw the game as a tool to discover music. Whether or not a player guessed each day's song based on the intro, they were provided with a link to listen to the full song on Spotify. Spotify may not have had a high click-through rate, so Heardle may not have helped much to discover music. The game would have also mimicked some music discovery features present in the app.
Heardle often featured music that didn't make the most-streamed charts, and seemed to care more about music going viral on TikTok. Also, some players were frustrated that Heardle would repeat songs by the same artist in a short amount of time. Over the course of five months last year, Heardle included six tracks from Green Day, and several tracks from Imagine Dragons. Spotify didn't have a dedicated team working on Heardle, so there will be no layoffs as a consequence of the closure of the game.
