Spotify to Shut Down Music Guessing Game Heardle

Spotify plans to shut down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music-guessing game it took over in July 2022, TechCrunch reports(opens in new window).

Spotify is reportedly trying to put more energy into music discovery within its app rather than off-platform initiatives like Heardle, giving players 6 attempts to guess popular songs. This game ends on May 5th.

Heardle did the work by linking to the full Spotify track of the song he guessed successfully, and the faster players guessed, the more points they scored.

Pop-up messages on the Heardle website(opens in new window) tells the player: After May 5th, hurdles will no longer be available.If you have stats you want to keep, be sure to go to stats(opens in new window) Take screenshots before May 4th. It will no longer be accessible after May 4th. ”

(Screenshot credit: Marco Marcelline / PC Mag)

This shutdown was done because the platform reportedly lost web access. According to statistics from web analytics firm Similarweb(opens in new window), Heardle peaked at 69 million monthly visits from desktop and mobile in March 2022. The number of visits had dropped to his 41 million just before Spotify acquired the platform last July. Last month, Heardle had just 6 million total visitors.

As TechCrunch reports, Spotify has decided to pull investment from Heardle after learning how players engage with games. After successfully guessing a song, too few players may have finished the game after playing rather than listening to the full track on Spotify. According to TechCrunch’s assessment, this means Heardle didn’t do enough to improve music discovery.

Spotify, which did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment, told TechCrunch:

According to TechCrunch, no team is working exclusively on Heardle, so there are no plans to layoffs or reorganize.