Heardle ("Name That Tune"-type game) shutting down May 5

The Game Room
1

Heardle is an internet game that started early last year during the Wordle (word guessing game) craze.

In Heardle, there is one song per day. The gist of the game is that you listen to the first second of the song. If you recognize it, you type in the song title and win! If you don’t recognize the song right away, you can click “skip” and play the first two seconds of the song. You have about five or six skips. The longest sample you can listen to is 30 seconds of the song. If you still don’t recognize the song after 30 seconds, you lose.

The game was fun until last July, when Spotify purchased it from its developer. Before Spotify ruined the game, I was usually able to win, often after hearing a single second of the song. After Spotify’s purchase, the songs became very obscure. Usually, they were deep tracks from albums made in the last 10 years or so.

This column by radio columnist Sean Ross is a good synopsis of what happened: Spotify Drops Heardle: The Importance of Human Curation and Delivering Expectations - RadioInsight . Spotify’s idea was that people would listen to the unfamiliar song-of-the-day on the Spotify app after being stumped in the game. What really happened is that Spotify alienated most of the game’s players. In Ross’s column, he says that Spotify eventually decided to add some more-familiar songs back into the game, but by that point, most of the audience was long gone.

2

That’s too bad! I played it a couple of times last spring, but for some reason didn’t keep playing; if ever a game was right up my alley, this was it.

There’s a definite history of big fish buying up cool smaller sites and ruining them. My go-to example is Woot! (woot.com) which used to be a lot of fun - I think it was the original ‘one day, one deal’ site.

Before Amazon bought it, it had already split off several categories with one deal of the day in each, but you could still look through it in a few minutes and decide if something interested you.

After Amazon bought it, there was so much different stuff on the site, some of which was one-day deals, and a lot of it wasn’t, that it was just another shopping site, and it went from being the first place I went to every day, to a site that had become too much trouble to bother with, in a matter of months. Haven’t been there in years.

3

I used to play Heardle pretty regularly – I’ve always been a sucker for “name that tune” – but I didn’t connect the noticeable increase in random/unknown songs to the Spotify sale until I read the OP! Totally makes sense, though. I already wasn’t enjoying the game as much as I had, and I deleted the bookmark as soon as the note appeared on their site that it would be going away on May 5.