Failure is all around us in 2022, as many powerful institutions are proving to be much less competent than we once believed. People are shirking their jobs everywhere, whether they are supposed to be taming inflation, invading Ukraine, or simply waiting on you at the pharmacy without an angry scowl. And then there’s Spotify’s acquisition of the Heardle daily puzzle game, which has become a sad but amusing example of hubris and ineptitude.
For those who don’t know, Heardle is an app that plays the beginning of a song and invites you to guess what it is. There is a new puzzle each day, and selections can be anything from classic Aretha Franklin to classic ABBA to classic Nirvana to not-so-classic (but unavoidably popular) acts like Ed Sheeran. Capitalizing on the success of Wordle, Heardle debuted in February and quickly gained a following of millions of daily users. The eclectic music selection appealed to virtually everyone. If you didn’t recognize a song because it was never a hit in your home country, you would likely bounce back with a win the next day. And maybe one of the less familiar songs would become a new favorite.
Spotify announced its purchase of Heardle in early July, and it seemed like a perfect fit for its business. Upon completing an audio puzzle (successfully or otherwise), users hear the first 30 seconds of the song. If it’s one that they like, they will be motivated to go to Spotify to listen to the rest of it. With the Heardle app’s programming already in place, and Spotify having streaming rights for thousands of hours of popular music, the game would pretty much take care of itself. And it could continue indefinitely, because new hits are always being made. Contrast that with Wordle, which will run out of five-letter words in a few years and will have to start making up terms like GNUPY and FROOM.
To no one’s surprise, there were a few glitches after the app was handed over to Spotify. A couple of the features broke, and the game stopped working altogether outside of the U.S., the U.K., and a handful of other English-speaking nations. Spotify promised to come up with a fix for the rest of the world, but in the meantime Heardle continued to be an enjoyable daily must-do in the countries where it was still available.
In August, however, Heardle began to deviate from the eclectic but generally familiar music that had made it so popular. The app developed an unhealthy obsession with music from the late 2010s – which wasn’t exactly a golden era for memorable tunes. Heardle wasn’t limiting itself to the major hits from this timeframe, either. August 22’s selection was by a young man named Jeremy Zucker, an American singer-songwriter who has not placed any singles on the charts except in New Zealand and South Korea. Jeremy is a talented fellow who might eventually become famous if he keeps working at his craft, but Heardle’s solve rate that day was probably lower than 1%.
Gradually, my interest in the game began to slip away. I used to be excited to get out of bed each morning and play the latest Heardle, but now it felt like a chore to skip through the first 16 seconds of the day’s song to see which unguessable Nobody McNobody was featured. Still I persevered, foolishly expecting the song choices to improve. I lost all hope a few days ago, however, when I saw that the song was by Alec Benjamin – for the second goddamn time in less than three weeks!!!
Who is Alec Benjamin, you may ask? I’m not really sure, but I can tell you that he has exactly the same number of U.S. top 40 hits as the aforementioned Jeremy Zucker. In an amazing coincidence, this is also the same number of Super Bowl rings won by the nun who taught 9th grade algebra at my high school.
There is probably some Alec Benjamin fan saying, “But, but, but, Alec has two platinum singles! How could you have never heard of him?” I hate to break it to you, but a RIAA Platinum plaque doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In the 1980s, a platinum designation was given only to singles that shipped two million copies within the U.S. No more than ten or so songs in the whole decade hit that mark, including “Another One Bites the Dust,” “We Are the World,” and Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing.” Today, the RIAA hands out these awards as if they were free samples of cheese at a Costco. The rapper Juice WRLD released his first full-length album in 2018 and died of a drug overdose in 2019. He earned nearly fifty platinum singles in his brief career. If you can name half of them without looking at his Wikipedia page, I’ll let you lecture me about how I’m just a cranky old man who doesn’t get today’s music. Which I admit is 100% accurate.
I’m aware that Spotify’s business needs don’t completely align with my goal of playing a free game and having a fighting chance to win most of the puzzles. But the changes to Heardle have also destroyed Spotify’s stated objective of helping users discover and rediscover music that they might enjoy hearing on its service. For one thing, who really wants to listen to the boring and depressing songs that keep popping up on Heardle lately? (Morose song titles recently included “All the Kids Are Depressed,” “Everybody Dies in Their Nightmares,” and “Six Feet Under.” On three consecutive days!) Even more comically, the feature that plays the first 30 seconds of the song has rarely worked correctly since Spotify took over. Seems like that would be important to roping in listeners, huh? And the inexplicable unavailability of the game in most of the world is like a middle finger directed at millions of the company’s customers. Little wonder that Spotify’s stock just reached a new all-time low, down more than 30% from where it was in August.
After the latest Alec Benjamin debacle, I checked the r/Heardle subreddit to see what other enthusiasts of the app were saying. It seems that most of them are migrating to a non-Spotified version of Heardle that one of the Redditors created. It eliminates most of the obscure 2010s selections and restores the game to its roots. I’ve played it for the past week and am pleased to have encountered five different decades of music so far. It’s enough to make me forget that I just spent ten paragraphs ranting about a silly game.
(Update 25-Jan-2023: I can no longer offer the new r/Heardle version of the game my unfettered praise. It often doesn't work in the U.S., and it has featured two arcane non-hit Daft Punk songs in just the last two weeks. Still, it's a nice effort by whoever created it.)
Comments