Heardle

» see heardle.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Wordle had belonged to the New York Times for about a month when Heardle appeared. Omakase Studios, a small agency in London, put it online at heardle.app on 26 February 2022: one song a day, the first second of its intro, six guesses. Each miss unlocked a longer piece, up to sixteen seconds, and each guess had to be picked from a search box, so you could not type "the one with the drums". The audio came from SoundCloud embeds, and the songs were chosen, in the developer's word, semi-randomly from tracks people had actually heard of.

By March it was drawing 69 million visits a month, by Similarweb's count, the biggest of the Wordle offspring after the original. Spotify announced on 12 July 2022 that it had bought it for an undisclosed sum, moved it to spotify.com/heardle and, in the same breath, cut its map: "Today, we're starting with users in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand", with a promise that hundreds of millions more would get it in their own languages soon. Traffic had already slipped to 41 million by then.

On 14 April 2023 a spokesperson told TechCrunch that "after careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to Heardle as we focus our efforts on other features for music discovery". The site showed a banner for three weeks and the game ended on 5 May. There had been no team working on it, TechCrunch understood, so nobody was laid off. The domain now bounces to the Spotify web player.

For five months the game was open to anyone with a browser, and for ten it was open to six countries, none of them Turkey. That is the whole of my relationship with it. The global version ran in the spring of 2022 when every timeline had a row of green squares in it, and the Spotify version was geofenced before I had a reason to try it. A daily game about English-language pop intros was built for someone else's radio anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ sixteen seconds ~

The design took Wordle's two rules, a single daily puzzle shared by everyone plus a result you could paste, and added the thing Wordle could not have: a clock that only moved when you failed. Six snippets, from one second to sixteen, meant a good player heard less of the song than a bad one, which is the opposite of how music usually works. The SoundCloud embeds meant the game paid no label and could vanish the day an embed did. Under Spotify the answer linked to the full track in the app, which was the point of buying it.

~ six countries ~

Jeremy Erlich, Spotify's global head of music, called the purchase a "playful" way to "enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans", and the newsroom post promised localized editions "further down the road". The six-country launch was the road. Nine months later the company said it was focusing on other discovery features instead, and the languages never came.

~ the fan editions ~

Heardle Decades, with one puzzle per decade of pop, was up within months of the original, and a video game music edition followed. Both were made by fans, and both outlived it. Today the name on a search page mostly means one of them. Spotify kept the trademark and nothing else that shows: heardle.app answers with a redirect chain that ends at open.spotify.com.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »