Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/14/23683240/spotify-shuts-down-heardle-music-guessing-game

by sine_break • 3 years ago

122 120 3 years ago

theverge.com

brink• 3 years ago

What was their original plan when they purchased it?

Was it just an acquihire all along?

akmarinov• 3 years ago

Own it in case it gets really popular

sublinear• 3 years ago

Which is often a losing strategy because selling out changes the product. It's the reverse-Midas touch where everything turns to crap.

klysm• 3 years ago

I think investors get FOMO when they see other companies buying things and think "oh shit maybe I'm missing out on this great opportunity" and reactively buy something that fits the trend in their space.

brookst• 3 years ago

This, though a sophisticated investor will call it “option value” rather than FOMO.

onion2k• 3 years ago

Maybe the intention was to shut it down..

celdon252• 3 years ago

I’m glad you posted this, that never would have crossed my mind.

celdon252• 3 years ago

The replies seem to be full of low-quality guesses, which is disappointing to see on this site (assuming they were not using sarcasm). I’ll try to do slightly better and link the actual press release and include the official statement.

Hopefully someone who has access to the C suite at Spotify can leak the actual answer here (I’m sure they will get right on that). For future reference just Google “x acquires y” if you want to attempt to get any insight about “what x planned to do with y after acquiring”.

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-07-12/spotify-to-acquire-m...

“We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans,” commented Jeremy Erlich, Global Head of Music, Spotify. “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. Since its debut, the game has quickly built a loyal following, and it aligns with our plans to deepen interactivity across the Spotify ecosystem.”

The official statement seems consistent with what was reported in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35570998

In other words, they tried to retool the tech toward an additional value proposition for both users and artists. The result failed to meet a quality bar, and therefore it was decided to axe the project.

rvba• 3 years ago

I wonder what happened to the people who decided to buy it? Was it bought with intention to integrate it or to close it?

I guess it is not worth to keep it on life suport with a skeleton crew just fixing bugs (if even needed)? But then why buy it in the first place?

Embrace and extinguish?

wincy2• 3 years ago

Thank goodness. One of my Facebook friends spams my feed with his Heardle score every day and it drives me crazy.

endisneigh2• 3 years ago

Why not mute notifications of that type?

TylerE• 3 years ago

You can’t, because they’re just normal text posts

pie4202• 3 years ago

You deserve that and much worse for still using Facebook in 2023.

wincy2• 3 years ago

I’m such a rebel, I even press “allow” when Facebook asks nicely if it can track me on my iPhone.

Sakos• 3 years ago

You can unfollow friends to stop getting their posts on your feed. It's what I did to clean up my feed back when I still used FB. Made a huge difference in FB's usefulness.

dralley• 3 years ago

I remain pissed that Twitter killed Scroll within 6 months.

vlunkr2• 3 years ago

Heardle was fun, but really needed more development. Why not use other parts of the song besides the intro? I think they also could broken it into genres or decades. I mostly lost interest because I'd go too many days with songs that I simply had no chance with. (I assume they are popular with the kids, but I'm out of touch)

_steady• 3 years ago

https://heardledecades.com/ you're welcome!

vlunkr2• 3 years ago

Nice, this is great!

pipe2devnull• 3 years ago

You might want to try heardledecades.com. It’s pretty amazing, whoever runs it deserves an award, they keep adding new stuff.

xii23• 3 years ago

I wanted to try it but it was never made available in Germany.

iamerroragent• 3 years ago

Seems reasonable.

It's a product that should, and perhaps could in a more bullish market, have grown their subscriber base while adding value to their core product.

Clearly they didn't get the numbers they wanted/needed and if everyone else is cutting right now, this is something that seems reasonable to cut from their expenses.

The concept of the game sounds cool though as a customer of the company itself however I didn't know about it.

Also I wouldn't put it past them to push features of the game directly into the Spotify app in the future. (Maybe they already have, I don't know).

javanissen• 3 years ago

They ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.

mnd9992• 3 years ago

Pre acquisition it was based on Soundclouds most popular 250, and most of them were well-known enough to be guessable.

I've no idea what source they switched it to, but there's a lot of obscure songs which makes it a lot less fun.

mnd9992• 3 years ago

Like today’s. No clue.

domh2• 3 years ago

Yeah I used to get it maybe 70% of the time in the first few seconds, and I just played it today and I have absolutely no idea what this song is. The main difference between Heardle and Wordle for me is that with Wordle you can sit there thinking on it for a bit and come back and you may have a new guess. With Heardle I either know it or I don't, I'm not gunna suddenly realise what song it is 5 hours later.

domh2• 3 years ago

One thing they also broke was the ability to press the skip button whilst the song is playing, and have it carry on playing to the new skipped point without completely restarting. If I dont know it in the first 3 seconds, it's annoying having to listen to that whole chunk again before hearing the 4th second.

ianferrel• 3 years ago

They also weirdly broke something that made it reliably play. Pre-spotify it would reliably play the first X seconds. After Spotify sometimes it would play less than that, which made it harder and less reliable.

Mathnerd314• 3 years ago

If they ruined it, then a new clone could probably do well. Probably a fun weekend project for someone to reimplement it.

Varqu3• 3 years ago

I will never understand why most of Big Tech acquisitions end up with a shutdown. (same for Google, FB, etc, apart from a few outliers)

Like: They could just buy a controlling stake, let it run by the original team and just add some cross promo to their main product.

rvnx2• 3 years ago

It's an open secret; this is how VCs never lose:

When a large fund has exited a successful public company, they will use their influence on the public company to convince the successful entity to purchase the failed ones.

This is a way to keep the machine going at the expense of the investors in the public company (they are holding the bag now anyway), and this way you always have a positive track record as a fund.

Sometimes, when influence is not enough, purchases can involve kickbacks to members of the board to make sure they are convinced that it's the right choice to do.

JimiofEden• 3 years ago

Heardle was one of the games that we really enjoyed quite a bit, but definitely needed some sort of variation to the game itself other than 'first x seconds'

Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn't get it at all because we didn't know the artist/it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen/the song was an obscure hit or one hit wonder before our time

Perhaps it would have been better as 'guess the artist' and give you 5 second clips from decreasingly obscure songs

DelightOne• 3 years ago

Why don't they just ask songs some of you once heard before using ur song history?

maxique• 3 years ago

Because then it loses the shareability - you can't compete with your friends when you're all getting different songs to guess

soneca2• 3 years ago

Never heard of it. Thought it sounded fun. Went to play it.

I had to skip without guessing to the end and then see today’s answer. I never heard that song in my life, nor ever heard of the artist. Connecting Heardle to my Spotify profile would make a more fun game.

soneca2• 3 years ago

The song was Tattoo, by Jordin Sparks btw

yubiox• 3 years ago

As long as heardle 80s stays up.

rvz• 3 years ago

Oh dear. Less than a year.

This is what happens when businesses follow and chase short-term hype cycles and end up wasting time and money in the end. The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0.

Facebook on the other hand with the Instagram acquisition gave returns into the tens of billions of dollars.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0.

negative, far below zero.

pwthornton• 3 years ago

Say what you will about Facebook, but its acquisition strategy has generally been strong.

Instagram has to be an all-time steal for what they paid for it. They also own What's App, a juggernaut in its own right.

Facebook's acquisition of Oculus was reasonable. It does remain to be seen if they can truly harness it or not.

encoderer2• 3 years ago

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

rektide• 3 years ago

I quit sometime after they ended extensions. It was so awesome having Spotify as a platform for dozens & dozens of extensions.

I wish I'd taken a screenshot or done a video tour of my setup before it shut down. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity days were so full of open endless possibility & fun. Spotify did so so so well, had such an interesting capable Javascript extension system built in to the app... then we're one of the first people to pack up & leave the party. I was shocked.

basisword• 3 years ago

Extensions were awesome. Took them about a decade to bring lyrics back after they killed extensions too.

transcriptase2• 3 years ago

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would?

Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself.

What are they optimizing for?

pie4202• 3 years ago

they get paid by Labels to promote certain songs and artists, similar to how labels pay radio to play only certain songs. Everything, from Amazon, to Spotify, to the Google Play Store wants you to click on promoted bullshit, not search for what you actually want. Welcome to the internet in 2023.

Bukhmanizer• 3 years ago

I think they’ve realized that as long as they don’t the licenses to the music itself, another company can always come along and eat it’s lunch (a la Disney+, Peacock, Hulu with Netflix. So they’re trying to raise the barriers to listening to “songs” rather than “whatever Spotify serves me”

itsibitzi• 3 years ago

You can jump straight to search using {Cmd,Ctrl}-L the same as a web browser, but for folks who're not used to key commands the decision to hide the search bar is absolutely deranged.

drewbeck• 3 years ago

In the desktop app Search is always available for me in the sidebar. Not for you?

I agree in general about their UX, though; it's part of the general enshittification, these companies always trying to squeeze us for more attention. The constant change has its own friction. And tt feels especially egregious on something as personal as our music.

solarkraft2• 3 years ago

What are they optimizing for?

Probably engagement. The more clicks, the better.

I've switched to Tidal. It pushes some ads too, but not nearly as badly. The discovery algorithm is slightly worse but pretty close. Most importantly it doesn't keep playing the same 3 songs (at least it's more like 30).

mostlysimilar• 3 years ago

They've been actively destroying their UX for years now. I am so tired of them forcing their Podcasts and audio books and whatever else on me.

The one thing I want Spotify to do well is algorithmic discovery. The Discover Weekly playlist is the only thing that keeps me on the service, and yet they make it more and more difficult to find. The position on the home screen is entirely random and unpredictable. The only reliable way to find it is by using the search feature.

transcriptase2• 3 years ago

I saw they had audiobooks, then stumbled around trying to just get a comprehensive list of what they had versus their weird “picks” from categories that don’t seem to exist.

Then I finally found something and saw that not only was it not included in my subscription, but the cost was higher than buying the hardcover on Amazon.

scjosh• 3 years ago

discover weekly is also my favorite, and i was having the same problem with it hopping around. to avoid needing to search for it, you can save it to your library to make it easily findable next to your other playlists. it’ll still auto-update weekly.

jeffwask2• 3 years ago

To be fair, I use Spotify mostly for podcasts and it's UX and search for Podcasts is also terrible.

Varqu3• 3 years ago

To be honest, I find their music recommendation algo still way behind what Pandora (the music streaming, not the jewelry brand) cracked years ago.

It amazed me with the fact that even after creating a radio from a single song, I got exactly what I wanted to hear (including new songs).

It's a shame that it's not available in Europe.

90-00-096• 3 years ago

I left Spotify after over a decade of daily usage several months ago. For all the reasons you have listed.

antifa• 3 years ago

Discover Weekly has this weird annoying behavior where the shuffle button disappears on that playlist, so I have to leave DW to any song anywhere else, turn off shuffle, then come back. DW doesn't need shuffle on, the playlist order is already random!

sleigh-bells• 3 years ago

Does Spotify still not have a way to pick up where you left off on a podcast after venturing into music for a while and coming back? I remember there being something extremely annoying about that very obvious usecase which made me just go back to Pocket Casts, even though that app can't even stream a podcast without some sort of skip or fast forward.

blfr• 3 years ago

It goes back to the moment you last listened (minus a couple of seconds) by default. Spotify is a decent podcast player, not AntennaPod but OK.

cratermoon• 3 years ago

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

broast• 3 years ago

The app ux is buggy and I'm one to complain on spotifys forums about it, but I do wonder about the sentiments in this thread, as I still find having access to spotifys library or capabilities with podcasts, music, playlists, making playlists, downloads, etc, to be a delight and I have not found myself seeking other applications to replace it as it gets so much daily use from me. Am I in the dark about something?

daniel_reetz• 3 years ago

It genuinely sounds like you may have absorbed and accepted the quirks of their interface.

I started using Spotify after Google killed Google Music. I find it totally egregious. My playlists feel hidden from me. Search is infuriating. The path to a full album is many clicks away. Even finding albums vs singles vs EPs is tough. In fact the app seems to discourage full-album listening. The recommendations for me have so far been totally completely underwhelming. And I'm constantly having Joe Rogan shoved in my face, not to mention a whole host of other stuff I have zero interest in.

We all get used to different paradigms, but Spotify feels like a particularly bad (and constantly shifting) case. If it was all I knew, I might think differently.

90-00-096• 3 years ago

I switched to Apple Music after using Spotify daily for over a decade. Music has a buggy UI as well but at least no podcasts and no books. Their discovery algorithm works better for me than Spotify (and Spotify was so good in the beginning! such a shame).

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

They took away the ability on Android to put playlists and album links directly on the home screen, which I used extensively. No discernable reason, and they have refused to reimplement. The "idea" on Spotify has a lot of Voi ed support but it's like being put in the kids corner. It's insulting.

I used to be loyal to Spotify because it was decent and they were in the music business specifically. Now I'm on YouTube Music and going to cancel Spotify paid.

uejfiweun• 3 years ago

Man, I must be the only person who actually LIKES the Spotify UX. The color scheme looks cool, the app is pretty intuitive and well designed IMO, and it also hasn't majorly changed in 10 years.

Shaanie• 3 years ago

People who like stuff typically aren't going around posting about it, especially not in these types of threads that appeal to those who dislike the company/app.

Personally I think Spotify is great and it works really well for me, the only thing I really don't like is the podcast push. While it's not as bad as it used to be, I wish I could toggle it off or banish it to some separate part of the app.

coldpie• 3 years ago

There's a ton of competitors in this space. Try something else!

Alupis2• 3 years ago

Come over to Pandora - the water is warm and your favorite songs are a flowing.

90-00-096• 3 years ago

Pandora's discovery algorithm is still top notch. But the rest is just awful: navigating to albums/artists, finding which words are clickable and not clickable, not being able to like or downvote some random sources (if it's a radio you can't like, or can - I can't remember and used to always get confused).

kccoder• 3 years ago

I recently subscribed to YouTube Premium, which includes YouTube Music, and for the first time in my life a system is recommending music that I actually like on a regular basis. I've discovered entirely new artists and even genres. Can't recommend it enough.

jeffwask2• 3 years ago

We pay for Premium as well and I started using music because "Hey it's included." It quickly became my main platform mostly because it stays out of the way and plays music.

vladf• 3 years ago

Same; I switched to YT Music b/c of better offline playback than Spotify Premium (and ofc YT Premium simply includes music!)

however i've found that the mixes introduce me to recommendations that I like at roughly the same rate as Discover Weekly.

What are you listening to for such good recommendations? Is the the automatic "Mix" playlists it creates?

jimnotgym• 3 years ago

Also you can trust Google to never shut down a service that you like. /s

Varqu3• 3 years ago

Is it better than the standard YouTube algo?

Because on YT video it's like:

You picked Rammstein? Sure, here is your next video with classical music, because you were listening to it last week.

iudqnolq• 3 years ago

They can't afford for you to listen to popular music. Everything they promote is an alternative to you listening to Taylor Swift.

They'd love it if you listened to podcasts. If you have to listen to music they want to convince you to listen to something unpopular they can license for cheap. That's why the push Discover stuff so hard.

donbrae• 3 years ago

I’d been using Spotify since 2009 and switched to Apple Music last year. The Apple Music UX is worse, but Dolby Atmos makes it worth it. As someone who listens to a lot of jazz with headphones, it’s a significant improvement over standard stereo. I’d go back to Spotify if they added the feature.

procinct• 3 years ago

I agree that the UX has become cluttered but Heardle was never integrated into the apps UX, it was a totally standalone website.

h4ch13• 3 years ago

Just day before I saw Spotify had the same ADHD inducing reels/tiktok style music discovery thing on it. What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE. As one commentor rightly said, Discover Weekly is the only thing keeping me on this platform, they even removed family mixes, my brothers and uncles are on my family plan, and even though we didn't keep in touch a lot that used to be a talking point whenever we met and was such a cool thing.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE.

any guesses?

h4ch13• 3 years ago

please illuminate me, my conspiracy theories will get me flagged to oblivion.

wpietri• 3 years ago

My guess is similar metrics yield similar solutions. With extensive copying, of course. You can bet that the product managers keep a close eye on things that are even vaguely competitive. But I think it's the metrics (and metrics-driven culture) that is the underlying cause.

90-00-096• 3 years ago

I heard about this change from so many sources. Where can I see it (which section)? I quit Spotify months ago but curious to see this pattern.

h4ch13• 3 years ago

There you go: https://streamable.com/7e1hka (pls ignore the content)

tinyhouse• 3 years ago

Spotify has a document oriented culture. All they do all day is writing docs. No wonder they cannot execute on anything meaningful. It's unfortunate because it's a great employer.

Mindwipe• 3 years ago

Do the documents also have like four words on each page and you've to spend your entire time scrolling to navigate?

green-salt• 3 years ago

I enjoyed Heardle because I'd like to say I'm good at identifying a lot of the songs. Unfortunate buyout/dump story.

oldstrangers• 3 years ago

This is the American dream in 2023. Get bought out and your product retired within the same year. Must be nice.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

Does this mean the Heardle developers will be tasked elsewhere, like writing that AirPlay 2 integration they've had the ability to do for well over a year now, instead of a stupid widget for our iPhone lockscreens that doesn't even do what people want it to?

scrollaway• 3 years ago

What makes you think the Heardle developers know anything about AirPlay?

deathanatos• 3 years ago

What an incredible journey. (https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

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