Spotify Ditches a Wordle Cousin

Heardle, the name-that-tune game inspired by the Wordle craze, is being dropped by Spotify less than a year after the music-streaming giant acquired it. “After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to Heardle," Spotify said Saturday in a statement, per the AP. First appearing in February 2022 amid a surge of games that used the format of Wordle, Heardle plays fleeting moments of a song and challenges users to see how quickly they can guess it. Saturday's mystery song was (spoiler alert) 1998's “Why Don't You Get a Job” by the Offspring.

After Spotify bought Heardle in July, users could go from revealing the song to playing it on the app. That sort of music discovery, or rediscovery, was Spotify's intention in acquiring the game from its creators. But the statement on the game's end said Spotify plans to "focus our efforts on other features for music discovery.” The company did not give further details on why it was ending the game, and it's not clear whether Heardle may continue life elsewhere. Spotify did not identify the apparently publicity-shy creator and seller when it announced the purchase. (Wordle, which was purchased by the New York Times, is still popular—though it appears to be only about a third as popular as it once was.)