How Spotify killed Heardle

In March 2022, Heardle^[1] was getting 69 million monthly visitors. Built by one unemployed developer, who pitched it to his friends as a joke in a group chat. Seventeen months later it was dead. What happened? Spotify acquired it.

How it started

In December 2021, the startup a London web developer was working at ran out of money. He found himself unemployed, watching his friends share Wordle scores in a group chat. He jokingly suggested someone should make one for music. A friend who used to work in music journalism told him to do it, since he had nothing else going on anyway. So he built it^[2], alone, in a few weeks. Launched February 26, 2022, under the banner of "Omakase Studios" to keep his name out of it.

Three weeks in: 1.75 million daily views. March peak: 69 million monthly visitors. Even Questlove, The Roots' drummer and probably the most publicly obsessive music nerd alive, was posting about it. Music nerds were losing their minds on Twitter.

Why it worked

The game was simple in exactly the right way. One song per day. Six guesses. Each wrong guess unlocked more of the intro: 1 second, then 2, 4, 7, 11, 16. You either knew it or you desperately wanted one more second of audio to jog your memory. That tension, a song right on the tip of your tongue, is an incredibly specific feeling, and Heardle weaponized it perfectly.

The curation was human. The developer picked from the most-streamed songs of the past decade, tilting toward pop and indie rock, enough mainstream for casual listeners to feel smart, enough variety for music nerds to feel genuinely tested.

Crucially: it was global. Free. No account. The technical backbone was the SoundCloud API, which let him stream tracks from the exact start of a song, something Spotify's own public API made surprisingly difficult.

The acquisition

By summer 2022, Spotify was deep into its "Audio First" era. Between 2020 and 2022 they bought podcast networks, audiobook platforms, AI voice companies, a Clubhouse competitor. They were acquiring everything that touched audio.

Heardle still had 41 million monthly visitors at the time of the deal. Spotify announced the acquisition^[3] on July 12, 2022, live at Summer Game Fest. Jeremy Erlich, their Global Head of Music, called it a "music discovery tool."^[4] The price was never disclosed, but based on comparable deals, Wordle sold for a "low seven figures," and analysts put Heardle in the same range. For a company reporting €3 billion in quarterly revenue, that's a rounding error. They were buying a ~~user acquisition funnel~~ music discovery tool on the cheap.

What they broke

Almost immediately, four things went wrong.

The data wipe. When Spotify migrated Heardle to their servers, millions of players logged in to find their stats and streaks gone. No warning. In daily games, the streak is basically the product, it's the hook that keeps you coming back tomorrow. Wiping it severed the habit loop for a huge chunk of the player base. Players were posting on Reddit^[5] like they'd lost something real. Because they had.

The geoblocking. Before the acquisition, Heardle was global, the SoundCloud API had enough flexibility to sidestep territorial music licensing. Spotify operates under major-label agreements that are not flexible at all. Overnight, the game was restricted to the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Everyone else got a hard error. Spotify said they planned to expand access eventually. They never did.

The broken reward loop. In the original, guessing correctly meant the song played instantly, right there in the browser. Under Spotify, you got a redirect: "open the Spotify app to hear the full song." That might sound like a minor inconvenience. The immediate auditory payoff was the whole point, the dopamine hit that made sharing your result feel worth it. Breaking it to serve a conversion metric killed the moment.

The curation fell apart. The daily song selections started getting weird. Too obscure to identify in 16 seconds on some days; then bizarrely repetitive, with Imagine Dragons and Green Day showing up multiple times in short windows. Players noticed.^[6] The human touch that made the original feel curated was replaced by something algorithmic and inconsistent.

And through all of this, they never integrated Heardle into the Spotify app. It stayed a standalone web URL, dependent on people remembering to open a separate tab every day. The New York Times put Wordle directly in their app. Spotify left Heardle alone on the internet, slowly losing traffic with no promotional support to speak of.

The macro pivot

Here's where the Heardle story stops being about Heardle and becomes about 2023 in tech generally. Heardle was acquired during the last gasp of the zero-interest-rate era, when Spotify was rewarded for buying things and figuring out why later. Then rates went up, growth slowed, and Wall Street started asking questions about the operating expense line, which had jumped 65% year-over-year and included, explicitly, Heardle.

In January 2023, Daniel Ek announced a 6% workforce reduction^[7] and said, in his memo, that Spotify had "spent far too much time syncing on slightly different strategies." Translation: we bought a bunch of stuff, not all of it made sense, we're cleaning house. Heardle was an easy cut, off-platform, declining, with no path to in-app integration and a shrinking international audience.

The shutdown

By March 2023, monthly visits had dropped from 41 million at acquisition to 6 million, an 85% collapse in eight months.^[8] Then on April 14, 2023, a popup appeared on heardle.app: "Heardle is going away on May 5th... Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye."^[9] Players were told to screenshot their stats before the servers went dark permanently.

As one music creator put it on Twitter: a major streaming corporation buying a beloved indie game, failing to support it, and shutting it down a year later because people stopped playing is "one of the most music industry things ever."^[10] Hard to argue with that.

The heir who actually cared

While Spotify was watching the numbers fall, Martin Snelling was already building the replacement. Snelling, a PR and marketing professional and not a full-time developer, had launched Heardle Decades before the original even shut down, starting with 80s and 90s music and expanding from there. When Spotify killed the official game in May 2023, Snelling launched reHeardle as a direct replacement and the displaced player base arrived. He's active on Reddit as "VinceClarke,"^[11] regularly talking with players, adjusting playlists based on how people are actually doing.

The scale he reached is worth dwelling on: 8 million monthly visitors, 200,000 daily active users, and 7 to 8 minutes of average session time.^[12] Spotify, with all its resources, couldn't keep the original past 6 million before giving up. Snelling got past that, with hand-curated tracklists pulled from UK and US chart data and a Playwire ad partnership to keep the lights on, without a corporate mandate, a product team, or a single dollar of VC money.

The detail that makes this story land properly: Heardle Decades runs on SoundCloud. The same infrastructure that powered the original game, that Spotify replaced when they integrated their own API, that broke global access overnight. SoundCloud's flexibility is what let the original work everywhere, no territorial blackouts, audio playing right in the browser the moment you guess correctly. Spotify swapped it out and broke everything. Snelling never did.

The portfolio is now enormous: decade games from the 1950s to the 2020s, 15+ genre variants (Prog Rock, New Wave, K-pop, Disco, Motown, Emo, and more), artist-specific games, Disney, TV themes, video game soundtracks. And, in a detail Spotify would find embarrassing, a stats transfer tool^[13] so players can move their history to a new device, the basic thing Spotify couldn't manage when they migrated the game and wiped everyone's streaks.

Bottom line

Spotify spent low seven figures acquiring Heardle, dismantled everything that made it work, and shut it down in under a year. Martin Snelling rebuilt it on SoundCloud as a side project, hit 8 million monthly visitors, and has been running it ever since, across decades, genres, artists, and niches Spotify never would have bothered with.

You can kill a website, but you can't kill a genuinely great idea, and Heardle was one. The song remains the same: free, browser-based, one puzzle a day, powered by SoundCloud, made by someone who loves games and loves music more than they love quarterly earning reports. That's the whole formula. It always was.

In DLES.gg collection you can find 14 active Heardle versions. Hear them out and have fun.

Isn't this, technically, a great happy ending?

-Peter