Spotify got Wordle envy and bought music-guessing game Heardle
Everyone wants to get into the daily gaming biz.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Heardle is one of our favoritegames like Wordle: it’s a music trivia game that gives you six guesses to identify a song, based on just a tiny snippet of audio. Like Wordle, Heardle offers up a new song to guess every day, making it easy to slip into your daily routine. Also like Wordle, which was purchased by The New York Times in January for more than $1 million, Heardle has now been snapped up by a big company: Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s buying the “music trivia sensation.”
Today’s Wordle: Take a hintGames like Wordle: More daily puzzlesWordle tips: Don’t let it STUMP you
In a poston its newsroom site, Spotify’s global head of music Jeremy Erlich wrote that “We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans.” Erlich said that Heardle fits into Spotify’s plans “to deepen interactivity across the Spotify ecosystem.”
The fact that Spotify has an ecosystem is news to me—I guess that’s a term you get to throw around when a whole lot of people use your service, even if an ecosystem is built around sustaining life rather than paying artistsan unlivable fraction of a centper song play. But Spotify has been expanding beyond music streaming in recent years, going big on podcasting and adding support for music videos and (soon) audiobooks.
Spotify may not be a gaming company, but the purchase makes a lot of sense. For years it has been especially focused on its music recommendation algorithms and smart playlists designed to keep people listening. The newsroom announcement says Spotify sees the game as a “tool for musical discovery,” making it just one more way to keep people engaged in its app. “Further down the road, we are also planning to integrate Heardle and other interactive experiences more fully into Spotify,” the post says. The focus on gaming as a fresh pasture is starting to look like a trend for streaming media companies, afterNetflix announced its gaming plans last July.
Spotify says Heardle will remain free and the “look and feel of the game” will also stay the same, but you’ll now be able to listen to the full song after playing. In the future, it plans to add support for more languages.
The old Heardle website now automatically redirects toSpotify.com/Heardle, but the look is indeed unchanged, other than a new Spotify logo in the corner.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites likeThe WirecutterandTestedbefore joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
Today’s Wordle answer for Friday, November 8
Death of the Reprobate’s creator drew inspiration from the timeless art of Hieronymous Bosch, Bruegel, and the poop joke
Palworld developer reports Nintendo’s suing over 3 Pokémon patents for only $66,000 in damages, but a videogame IP lawyer says fighting the lawsuit could mean ‘burning millions of dollars’
