Music streaming giant Spotify recently announced it had purchased the popular mobile trivia game Heardle. This is the first acquisition of its kind for Spotify. The company plans to use the game as a way for music lovers to become more engaged with the service and combine it with their algorithm to find new music for users.
Heardle’s developers drew their inspiration from the success of the popular literary puzzle game Wordle, recently purchased by The New York Times.
Global head of music at Spotify, Jeremy Erlich, said of the company’s recent acquisition:
“Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge. We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans.”
At present, the game is only available on the company’s website. Similar to the format of Wordle, the game will play a song, and users must guess the correct title and artist within six or fewer attempts.
When the answer is revealed, Heardle will open a link to the song on Spotify for users to add to their playlists. Before being owned by Spotify, Heardle songs would link to the free music streaming platform SoundCloud.
Heardle on Spotify will first reach users in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which are primarily English-speaking countries. From there, the game will be adapted and made available in other countries and other languages. There has been no comment by Spotify on when that will happen.
In a press release, Spotify reassured existing Heardle players that “the look and feel of the game will stay the same, and it’ll remain free to play for everyone.”
However, it pointed out that “players [can now] listen to full songs … at the end of the game,” which was not previously a feature.
According to recently released analytics from Similarweb, Heardle reported 69 million monthly users in March of 2022 and 41 million monthly users in June of 2022.
Other tech media giants are also getting involved in gaming acquisitions — Netflix recently bought developer Night School Studio and began offering games, some of which are based on its most well-known titles.