Spotify acquired Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music guessing game

It wasn’t a bug if you attempted to listen to Heardle this morning and were instead taken to the Spotify website. 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 adored offshoots that have appeared in the mold of Wordle, the daily word game that gained so much traction that The New York Times bought it. You are given the first second 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 length of the clip doubles after each incorrect guess. You have a full 16 seconds to determine whether or not you are the music connoisseur you believe yourself to be.

According to a press statement from Spotify, “for existing Heardle players, the appearance and feel of the game will keep the same, and it’ll remain free to play for everyone.” And as of right now, gamers can listen to the complete song on Spotify when the game is over.

Players were encouraged to support the game before it was purchased by Heardle by making contributions through the creator tipping website ko-fi. Its Ko-Fi page is currently inactive. Even so, certain Heardle rip-offs created by fans, such as Lorde Heardle (… a genuine missed opportunity 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 acquisition. 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.

Heardle is still a wise acquisition for Spotify even though it may not be as well-known as Wordle. The game reached a peak of 69 million monthly desktop and mobile site visits in March, according to web analytics company Similarweb. There were 41 million visits to the Heardle website in the previous month.

Due of Spotify’s efforts to enhance music discovery and retain users on its app, this acquisition makes sense. Heardle has the potential to generate natural social media shares for the app, much like its well-liked Spotify Wrapped feature, which this year even included a game. The hilarity has now spread to Spotify’s official Twitter account.