If you tried to play Heardle this morning and got redirected to a Spotify website, that wasn’t a glitch. Spotify announced today that it acquired the Wordle-inspired music guessing game, which the streamer will leverage to support music discovery.
Heardle is one of many beloved spinoffs that have cropped up in the vein of Wordle, the daily word game that became so popular that it was acquired by The New York Times. In the game, you’re served the first second of a popular song. If you can guess which song it is within one second, then congrats, you win! If not, you have six tries to guess, and after each failed guess, the length of the clip doubles. By your final guess, you have a full 16 seconds to see if you’re the music aficionado you think you are.
“For existing Heardle players, the look and feel of the game will stay the same, and it’ll remain free to play for everyone,” Spotify wrote in a press release. “And effective today, players can listen to the full song on Spotify at the end of the game.”
Before its acquisition, Heardle invited players to make donations via ko-fi, a creator tipping platform, to support the game. Now, its ko-fi page is no longer active. Still, some fan-made Heardle spinoffs like Lorde Heardle (… a real missed opportunity to call it “Lordle”) remain online.
Ody Team is a qualified social media expert at Coding The Line, London. He had graduated from the University of Cambridge