Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game it bought last year

techcrunch.com:

Spotify is closing down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music guessing game it acquired last July for an undisclosed sum. Similar to Wordle, Heardle offers players six tries to guess a popular song — but instead of typing in different letters to form words, players listen to a song’s intro to guess the artist and title. At the time of its acquisition, Spotify said Heardle would remain free to play for everyone. Now the company will be sunsetting Heardle on May 5, as it aims to focus on its other objectives around music discovery.

The decision to close Heardle, we understand, came about because Spotify wants to devote more of its energy towards music discovery through its recent app changes, not through Wordle-inspired gameplay off-platform.

Last month, Spotify rolled out a significant redesign of its mobile app experience that introduced new TikTok-style discovery feeds for music and podcasts along with other features, like Smart Shuffle for playlist recommendations and a new podcast autoplay option, among other things. It also rolled out an “AI DJ” that figures out what sort of music users like, then plays those tracks for you. The feature also gets smarter over time the more you engage with it.

In light of these updates, Heardle was no longer a major part of Spotify’s overall music discovery efforts. In addition, like many tech companies that have undergone belt-tightening measures like layoffs in recent months, there’s less of a financial incentive to dabble with side projects — including the likes of a fun music game, for instance.

Heardle, however, had still been fairly popular at the time of its acquisition. According to data from web analytics firm Similarweb, the game peaked at 69 million monthly desktop and mobile web