Wordle was a popular game when it initially made waves, to the point that it got acquired by The New York Times. It has also inspired other games utilising a similar idea. One of them is Heardle, which is most simply described as the audio version of the game. Now, like the original, Heardle is also being acquired, but by music streaming giant Spotify.
Then Verge quotes Jeremy Erlich, global head of music at Spotify, as saying that the company wants to use Heardle as a music discovery tool. As he puts it, “Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge”.
If you’re unfamiliar, you play Heardle by guessing the song being played within six tries. You first get the opening notes of the song, with hints of increasing length. When the answer is revealed, you get linked to the song on SoundCloud. Following the acquisition, the answers now link to the song on Spotify instead. But that doesn’t seem to fix the game being region-locked.
The acquisition makes a lot of sense for Spotify, since now answers to Heardle are linked to its app. This means that it’s taking everyone who plays the game and turning them into its own users, possibly even subscribers. But for all the things that Spotify has done, this is probably on the lower scale of what people that are already subscribed to the service wants. In comparison, what people really want, which is HiFi, is still nowhere to be seen.
(Source: The Verge)
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