Spotify bought viral game Heardle, then shut it down nine months later

Heardle was a free daily web game: hear a song's intro, guess artist and title in six tries, then play the full track on Spotify.

A daily music-guessing game could drive music discovery for Spotify — a bet killed once discovery moved inside the app and traffic kept falling.

Heardle rode the Wordle craze as a music version, peaking at 69 million monthly desktop and mobile web visits in March 2022; Spotify acquired it that July for an undisclosed sum, promising it would stay free.

Visits kept declining and the Wordle craze cooled after The New York Times bought the flagship game in January 2022. In early 2023 Spotify redesigned its app around discovery feeds, Smart Shuffle and an AI DJ, and began belt-tightening; Spotify Live, another side project, was shut down the same month.

Spotify announced Heardle would sunset on May 5, 2023, saying it would focus music-discovery effort on features inside its own app.

Spotify's redesign rebuilt discovery inside the app, leaving an off-platform game doing the same job with less data.

Heardle's traffic was in structural decline before the deal — 69 million to 41 million monthly visits in months — and kept falling.

The click-through to Spotify was the whole point; if players exited without listening, the game failed its business test.

2023's cost-cutting climate made a beloved but duplicative side project an easy cut, alongside Spotify Live.

Acquiring a viral game to serve a strategy only works while the strategy has a hole in it — once the platform builds the feature itself, the standalone version is redundant.

As of April 14, 2023, a banner on the Heardle site alerted players to the May 5 shutdown; Spotify said its remaining games and interactive features, including its Roblox island and console integrations, would continue.