Johannesburg – Spotify announced on Tuesday its acquisition of Heardle, a thematic cousin to early this year’s social media sensation Wordle.
This mirrors The New York Time’s purchase of Wordle, which brought tens of millions of new users to the publication’s platform.
Heardle challenges the player to identify a song from a list based on a snippet of its opening notes. Users get six guesses, with each incorrect guess unlocking a few more seconds of music to guess from.
Prior to the acquisition by Spotify and subsequent changes to its website, Heardle peaked at 69 million monthly website visits in March and achieved 41 million visits in June.
While this pales in comparison to Wordle’s popularity right before its buyout, Heardle promises to bring new traffic and different kinds of engagement to Spotify’s industry-leading platform.
In their announcement post, Spotify advertises Heardle as a way to enhance music discovery – giving users a new way to interact with music they may never have heard. And now that the game is connected to Spotify’s service, users will be able to jump straight over and listen to the full version of the day’s song.
Unfortunately, Heardle is now (temporarily) unavailable in South Africa and the website will inform you that you cannot play from your location.
This is a classic move from the wonderful world of music licensing that South Africans have probably experienced on platforms like YouTube.
Heardle is available in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s unclear when they plan to expand the service, though Spotify has committed to doing so.
This seems like a great move from Spotify following the clear success of the format with Wordle. There is a clear want by the public to engage in these small challenges whose results can be easily posted to and talked about on social media.
It is refreshing considering the comparative lack of innovation from the world’s biggest music streaming platform. With access to such a comprehensive library of music alongside what must be an incredible amount of user listening data, Spotify’s dearth of fun or interesting user interaction is disappointing.
The streaming service has the purchasing power to make use of the latest in machine learning and audio processing systems, as well as the data to power it. Yet Spotify lacks unique or robust playlist generation / sorting / searching features.
Why can’t I search for “female-fronted afro-prog with brass elements”? Or have access to a somewhat effective and detailed genre-searching system? We have the technology, and Spotify’s recent statements on increasing interesting user interactivity is heartening to hear.
However, it’s important to consider the potential monetisation models behind acquiring systems like Heardle. Part of Spotify’s business model is advertising fees from including artists in their official playlists and categories.
Heardle promises to be a tool for bringing different kinds of music to mass attention, where people can be exposed to snippets of songs they may not have heard and immediately listen to the full version if they are interested.
However, it seems plausible that being featured on Heardle will become an advertising bidding game – a tool to push you music from people with the money to do so rather than a journey into the music unknown.
IOL Tech