Spotify to shut down Heardle, the music version of Wordle

Heardle, the Spotify-owned musical take on Wordle, is getting shut down soon on May 5th.

In July 2022, Spotify acquired Heardle, a music version of the popular word game Wordle, and just under a year later, Spotify has announced that it’s shutting down Heardle soon on May 5th, 2023. In the past, Spotify promised that Heardle would be free and available to everyone, but it looks like that is no longer the case.

If you aren’t familiar, the original Worde was a web-based word game created by Josh Wardle in 2021 that was then acquired by the New York Times Company in 2022. Wordle’s core concept is that each day you get a new five-letter word you’ve got to guess within six tries. Each time you guess, you get more information about what the final word is, and the goal of the game is to guess the daily word with the fewest amount of tries possible.

Heardle is set up quite similarly, but instead of words, it’s about music. Basically, with Heardle, you listen to short chunks of a song’s introduction and try to guess what the song is by listening to the shortest amount of the song as you possibly can. Since Spotify’s acquisition, after you guessed the song you could opt to listen to the full track on Spotify, but it seems like that hasn’t brought enough listeners to Spotify to justify keeping the game up and running.

Spotify didn’t give much of a reason for shutting Heardle down outside of wanting to focus on other aspects of its music discovery business, but if we had to guess, we’d imagine that it comes down to Spotify not getting much in the way of traffic via Heardle and its user numbers dwindling. However, you’ve still got a month to try out Heardle if you’re interested, as the service is set to close down on May 5th.

While certainly sad for fans, Wordle’s many imitators never managed to go as viral as the original game did, so it’s altogether not too surprising that the clones aren’t getting endless support.