“Heardle” will be removed from Spotify on May 5th
Fans of Heardle will be disappointed by Spotify’s announcement: The song-guessing game, which the company purchased last summer, is being discontinued. “Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” a message on the Heardle webpage reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.”
Players who want to track their details for any kind of family down the line ought to take a screenshot, Spotify says. After May 4, the stats won’t be available anymore.
In the wake of Wordle’s enormous success, Heardle made its debut early in the year. As a result, it rose to prominence and became one of the most successful Wordle clones. Outsider information recommends that Heardle arrived at a high of 69 million month to month guests last Walk.
The producers of Heardle offered the game to Spotify in July. However, just before that deal was made public, Heardle’s monthly visitors appeared to have dropped to 41 million, indicating that the game was already losing popularity. In contrast, Wordle’s owner, The New York Times, claims that tens of millions of people continue to play the game each week.
At the point when it purchased Heardle, Spotify said it saw the game as a music discovery tool. Whether a player effectively speculated every day’s tune in light of the introduction or not, they were provided with a link to hear the full track on Spotify. Heardle may not have significantly contributed to music discovery in the end because Spotify may not have been experiencing high clickthrough rates. Additionally, some of Spotify’s app’s music discovery features are said to have been copied by the game.
It seems unlikely that Spotify’s daily song selections contributed to the situation. Heardle included a number of classic songs as well as music that didn’t exactly top the Billboard charts but instead went viral on TikTok. Spotify appears to have failed to strike a balance between using Heardle as a tool for music discovery and making each song recognizable enough for fans to recognize and keep their streaks going.
Additionally, some players were dissatisfied with the fact that Heardle featured multiple songs from the same artist in a relatively short amount of time, repeatedly returning to the same wells. Despite having thousands of well-known artists and hit songs to choose from, Heardle featured six Green Day tracks in the space of five months last year. In addition, there have been far too many appearances of Imagine Dragons songs over the past few months (one would have been sufficient).
Since Spotify reportedly did not have a team specifically dedicated to working on Heardle, the game’s closure will not result in layoffs. It’s hard to imagine how hard it would have been to pick one song each day and keep Heardle up.
