Spotify announced on Tuesday that it will acquire Heardle, a daily music trivia game that tasks players with identifying a song based on its opening notes.
Why is this important: The deal builds on Spotify’s efforts to make it easier to discover and interact with music on its platform.
- “We see Heardle as more than a trivia game,” Spotify said in a statement announcing the deal. “It’s also a musical discovery tool.”
Details: Heardle is inspired by the popular word guessing game Wordle, which was acquired by The New York Times in 2022.
- Like Wordle, Heardle is only available once a day to players on its own website and app. It gives users just six tries to guess a popular song based on its opening notes. The more guesses a user uses, the more a song’s notes are exposed.
- For existing Heardle players, the look of the game will not change with the acquisition and the game will remain free for everyone.
- With the deal, players will now be able to listen to the full song on Spotify after the game ends.
- Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Between the lines: During an investor presentation in June, Spotify executives laid out a plan for the company to invest more in music discovery, noting that from Q1 2021 through Q1 2022, artists who leveraged Spotify’s “discovery mode” feature retained 98% of their customers.
- “Playing Heardle might just help you rediscover old tunes you thought you forgot, discover amazing new artists, or finally give a title to that wordless melody you’ve stuck in your head forever,” it reads. in the press release.
The big picture: Games are increasingly being used by media giants to push users to spend more time with their content and on their platform.
- The New York Times said in May that its seven-figure acquisition of Wordle in January had attracted “tens of millions of new users unprecedented in The Times.”
And after: The game will be available from Tuesday in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with more countries to follow in the future.
- Soon, the company said, “hundreds of millions more people around the world will be able to play and enjoy the game in their native language.”
- Later, the company plans to more fully integrate Heardle and other interactive experiences into Spotify.
