Spotify Acquires Music Trivia Game Heardle
Spotify has been a notable force in the streaming space for a long time as the company has always been something grander than Apple Music as a music streaming service, Spotify has changed its platform numerous times and has even landed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, added lyrics and visual elements to songs provided by the artists themselves, and much more to make it a more unique and enjoyable service beyond playing specified music on the spot. Although Spotify has come under criticism often, the company has never let it stop them from growing and becoming a more diverse platform with each update, upgrade, and acquisition. On July 12th, Spotify released a press release that stated their intent to acquire the music trivia game known as Heardle which we’ve gone into detail about below, as well as Heardle before the interest of Spotify, and what it could mean for both platform’s future.
Spotify
Spotify, the Sweden-based music streaming service, which holds everything from Bruce Springsteen to music from Square Enix, could be compared to similar services such as Apple Music, or the recently acquired Epic Games‘ Bandcamp. While Bandcamp may be popular, it’s not more monumental than Apple Music and Spotify as they are the leading music streaming subscriptions, but also has provided different types of services for artists, besides pay rate. While Apple Music has stayed generally the same when it came to features and looks, Spotify has made changes that haven’t even been noticeable to some users for a while, such as changing the color of the icon from green to another green. Overall, with Heardle acquired by Spotify, it’s likely that the quiz will take up some portion of the home screen, or have its own dedicated section that’ll be accessible to users of the service.
Heardle
Heardle could be most easily compared to Wordle, for those that have never heard of Heardle, and for those that haven’t heard of Worlde, well Heardle gives players a song of the day to try to figure out in growing increments as failed guesses are submitted. Heardle has been heavily considered a Wordle clone, simply for its setup once on the actual website, as well as the daily theme of a new “puzzle” every day. With The New York Times acquisition of Wordle at the peak of its popularity, it’s smart for Spotify to have done the same, maybe even sooner in comparison to the level of popularity that Worldle had at the time of its purchase. Although the site interestingly doesn’t have a symbol key on the site so without playing Wordle or similar games it’s hard to know exactly what the symbols mean. When playing, players have a total of 6 guesses to correctly answer the daily question “what song is this?” beginning with a 1-second clip from the song. If a song even comes to mind, simply type it into the field and a selection of songs will appear for you to choose from. Each incorrect guess, as well as each skip, will unlock more of the song to listen to, with a total of a 16-second clip available to listen to. Now with the symbol key or lack thereof, there are very few, simple possibilities. Incorrectly guessing the song or artist will result in a red “x” symbol stating that the answer was completely incorrect, whereas getting a yellow “x” states that the artist was correct, but the song title was not.
Future of Spotify with Music Trivia Game Heardle
To bring up Wordle once again, The New York Times likely acquired the popular daily word puzzle game to build on its already quite extensive library of daily refreshed games such as Tiles, Spelling Bee, Sudoku, Vertex, Letter Boxed, Chess, and of course Mini Crossword in addition to their most popular game, The Crossword. The same could be true for Spotify will their acquisition of Heardle as they could be looking to build a more interactive and fun experience for users, and Heardle certainly wasn’t a bad place to start as the theme fits Spotify perfectly. Spotify also informs users of their stats compared to their previous year of the service, something Apple Music has since adopted themselves. Thankfully, following the trend of Worlde, these games are free and don’t require a subscription to Spotify, or The New York Times, as well as being available via websites versus apps directly on a smartphone. A variety of different artists have already appeared on Heardle since becoming popular, such as Fun., Adele, and My Chemical Romance, which has already helped showcase the possible artists that’ll appear throughout the lifetime of the music trivia game Heardle, recently acquired by Spotify.