Spotify to acquire Heardle | Hacker News Reader

Spotify to acquire Heardle

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I always felt that streaming services had untapped potential in "playing" with content. Previously, a trivia game would need specific rights to use movie clips, but if the user has an HBO Max subscription and already could access all of those films, there isn't much harm in using clips (other than unrealized licensing fees).

In the same way, I hope Spotify is thinking of every way people may hear music. Not just active listening but trivia (like Heardle), radio shows, amateur documentaries, etc. The underlying technology is already there. I'm sure designers have many more ideas, but there is always the looming threat of Cease & Desist.

The problem many complain about though is that this shifts the point of the Spotify product. Those who want a clean interface for listening to music, often specifically out of one's library of "liked" albums and playlists, now deal with a UI encumbered with podcasts, social features, and I guess now games.

At some point soon there will be room for a "just your music" streaming service.

Ideally they could make each of these separate apps. There's no technical reason why multiple apps couldn't be published by Spotify that all use the same IP.

If they do this they will not have the same uptake on those apps as the main one. Eventually someone will have the bright idea to merge them.

Gmail, Drive, and Calendar all probably share a decent amount of backend data despite them all sharing some backend data as part of the G Suite, and the main Facebook app has almost a superset of the data in Messenger app (the only thing I can think of that might be missing is the "stories" stuff in Messenger, but I also don''t really know anyone who uses that). While Spotify doesn't have anti-trust concerns like Facebook and Google (at least right now), I'm a bit skeptical that there's any worries about having a combined G Suite app or merging Messenger back into Facebook proper being that much of a monopoly concern given how entwined they already are in the browser.

I quit Spotify a few months back for this reason.

Apple Music is better but still overrun with computer generated playlists. I wish I could turn them all off, or have them all contained within a “radio” tab, and not all over the “listen now”, “browse” and even artist pages.

I've used Spotify for ~9 years years exclusively for music streaming and I guess I get a podcast suggestion on the homepage every once in awhile but I just ignore it and move on. You can permanently hide the "friend" view in settings, no one I know has used it since college.

Aside from moving some small things around so they take 2 taps instead of 3 or 4, their UI has barely changed at all. It has a working Linux client. It has boundless capability to help you discover new music.

I don't know why people on here act like Spotify is an abomination, you can still just buy and own your music if you insist.

Literally the only thing I would change is for them to pay the artists more. And I'd happily pay triple the price to make that happen.

Frustrations with Spotify:

1. I used to actively look forward to my weekly recommendations. By the end, they were recommending music that was already in my most played. And lots of generic indie folk crap that all sounded the same. I didn't seem to be able to convince it that I didn't like it.

2. I'd search for specific albums by specific artists and get guided instead to playlists.

3. Forcing it to play an album in the original order was strangely difficult when playing on a smart speaker.

4. Downloaded music wouldn't play on a device with poor internet. Sat on a train enough times unable to listen to music that I used VLC instead.

5. It sometimes took 20-30 seconds (and even a restart of the app) to get it to play a track. On a newish iPad (same on iPhone) and decent internet.

Spotify's whole mission seems now to be less about appealing to music lovers, and more about generating a constant background noise.

> I used to actively look forward to my weekly recommendations. By the end, they were recommending music that was already in my most played. And lots of generic indie folk crap that all sounded the same. I didn't seem to be able to convince it that I didn't like it.

This is the way of the Discover Weekly, it recommends music that is sonically similar to what you listen to most. Eventually you run out of music that is actually good that is sonically similar to what you already listen to.

You can also do

* song/album/artist radio on any song/album/artist you hear, which will be matched to that song/album/artist and not your personal pref.

* release radar - new song release weekly by your favorite artists or similar artists

* automatic mix playlists with a friend that bring in their music preferences

* daily mixes - 90% songs you like and already listen to, separated by genres, with a handful of new ones mixed in

... and that's just a small percentage of what is or can be automatically generated by Spotify. There are endless user-created playlists to explore.

> I'd search for specific albums by specific artists and get guided instead to playlists.

The search can be filtered by whether you want songs, albums, artists, playlists, podcasts, or profiles. It's the top, most obvious option on search, right below the search bar.

Their search has also improved massively in the last few years to where you don't need to filter and can just type the song name and artist/album name in the same search to filter out all the similarly named songs by other artists - it no longer indexes the search on just a single attribute.

The rest sound like device issues. Never encountered them across Androids, iPhones, Ipads, Macbooks, Linux laptops, etc.

I suspect Spotify have taken a similar approach to devaluing all complaints about their UX/UI, thus why people like me have deleted their account.

Yeah, I actually found a lot of great music from Spotify's suggestions that I wouldn't have listened to otherwise. However, their suggestions for me are now stuck in such a specific (and frankly kind of weird) musical niche that they've become useless.

A big part of it is probably because I try to only use Spotify for discovering new music. Anything that I know I actually like gets added to my local music library instead and is never played through Spotify.

edit: Is there a way to tell Spotify to forget what it thinks it knows about my taste in music? I think I'd prefer starting over from scratch instead of trying to feed it more information about what I already listen to.

Contact the support desk. They helped me migrate to a new account once and migrated everything in my library over. Idk about the recommendation engine bc that wasn't a concern of mine but I had a human on the other side helping me figure out my situation through email. This was 2019ish

I think the recommendations are still great, just this week I discovered Hällas for example.

> 1.

Check this page out if you haven't: https://open.spotify.com/genre/made-for-x-hub

I'm not sure why they keep this hidden but it's all the Spotify-generated playlists. Still, I feel that they are boxing me into arbitrary niches of genres so I make sure to look for new music elsewhere.

> 4.

I have noticed this as well. I typically turn my internet off completely at which point Spotify does not try to load from server and lets me listen immediately.

Too late now. I’ve deleted my account and happy with alternatives. I hope it helps someone else though.

How are you getting so few podcasts? I never use Spotify for podcasts but it is 50% of the Home Screen - every other row. At some point they took to embedding podcasts in playlists but it seems they stopped later?

I don’t like how they play hide and seek with key features - they added lyrics, then they go rid of lyrics, then they added genius, then they got rid of genius, now they have lyrics again… why not give me both?

Also embarrassing that they have infinite resources to screw up the podcast ecosystem, yet they’ve fallen behind Amazon Music, Apple for quality and format choice (lossless, Atmos).

They keep adding more shit so they can "justify" subscription increases. I'm a Spotify user and look forward to paying for Heardle and never using it (because why offer a cheaper, non-heardle tier?)

No thanks.

I’m already annoyed that UI on iPhone is too “busy” and there’s no way to turn off the lyrics display.

If they want to add extra crap, they should put it in a new app.

Even more so now that libspotify is gone.

As we’re adding single data points, I like to submit that I’m fairly interested in seeing what this has to offer.

Just today I was pleasantly surprised I was seeing some music videos while playing Spotify content and I actually appreciated watching them while exercising, because frankly, there’s no other way I would ever watch a music video any other way nowadays.

Giving artists control of that visual element has to be an intentional way to make the music "stickier". Physical albums had artwork and literature to help a listener get to know an artist. Showing lyrics, music videos, visuals, and other elements may not matter to some listeners, but it definitely is not a mere annoyance.

The main reason we don’t see a lot innovation in this space from the streaming services, is that using the music inside an interactive experience such as a game requires a different license.

It would be fairly simple to make a tap/swipe/press game with a similar experience to rock-band, automatically for all music on a service. But having looked into this, together with a few major music services, the license cost made it almost impossible in practice.

And now I am greeted with 'Heardle isn't available in your location...'. (Germany)

I guess it's related to copyright, but Spotify is available? Not sure how that works.

Kinda sad anyway, Heardle was good fun.

I'm pretty perturbed at this too, but I find it funny that Spotify wouldn't be available in Germany. I remember years ago being jealous of Europeans that they had Spotify and we (the US) didn't.

A friend reported the same, but I can access heardle just fine (both Germany). I wonder what's up with that ...

I can't acces it either from Switzerland, doesn't matter if I connect to it normally or via US/German VPN...

PR hug of death?

Also cannot access from Germany.

I can’t access it from France

I do not find the game fun or interesting. All I got was a drum track that could have been pretty much anything for the first 4 attempts, and then the song was obvious the moment the singer started singing.

It might be more interesting if it wasn't just the beginning of the song.

I knew the artist on the very first drumbeat, just couldn’t remember which song it was, so I got it in 3.

Yeah, it's pretty rewarding when your brain knows a 1 second drum sound. haha

Interestingly, that is how normal people can end up with "perfect" relative pitch. Many people can almost instantly remember the notes of their favorite songs and so using those as anchors give people without perfect pitch the ability to determine chord/key/etc via relative pitch.

A second or two of a song is shockingly good at triggering your memory of songs you know well.

I didn't realize that's how perfect relative pitch works. That's super cool.

There's probably other ways, i'm far from knowledgeable. But the way i described is quite approachable for normal people

I only know one song by that artist, so my choice was obvious.

Funny enough, my first guess was "Bleachers" but they weren't a choice, so I went with "fun." Until today I had no idea Jack Antonoff led both bands.

spoilers! ;)

The game is differentiating the drum tracks to find the song. It's kind of the point. I have a lot of fun with it and do solidly well from time to time.

To be fair, it’s mostly not just drum tracks. That’s a bit of an exception.

I agree. Today's first 4 seems repetitive. You either knew it on 1 or had to skip to 5. I hope they improve the game a bit.

The funniest like that, IMO, was "Jolene" - 2-4 added basically no info to what was obvious in 1, then 5 was "JOLENE JOLENE JOLENE"

It may just not be your game, but I suggest giving it a few days. There are definitely some tracks where I feel the same as you, but this happens to be one where I got it on my first try.

Another aspect of the game is the guessing itself. It auto-complete so you can narrow down based on the limited library. For example, if you think it's a particular band but can't remember the track, you might be tempted to skip. Instead, type in the band's name and maybe there are only a couple of tracks to choose from, helping you narrow it down further.

I'm curious if that will expand (and therefore become harder) with this acquisition.

It is a slightly binary game for me in terms of knowing it or not. But it’s one second out of my day for something that I enjoy in those cases and there are a few where I struggle to put my finger on it but get there eventually.

Nonetheless I tend to listen to the song on that day anyway, which is always nice.

Today’s one is kinda weird in that there’s not a lot to go on for most of the song, and even then, the song is kinda weird in that the chorus, that people know, is very detached from the rest of the song.

It probably depends on the distinctiveness of the song, how used you are to it and how many other songs you know with a similar start.

I only knew that one song that starts with that drum beat, so to me, it could not have been anything else. But if you are familiar with a wider selection of songs, the chance of multiple matches (and hence wrong answers) is higher.

As much as I want to like Heardle - I'm with you. The problem with the game is their database though. They only have up to 4 songs per artist and it looks like they acquired the songs before thinking about what songs would make up a good game.

Good on you as well though - most people don't know how to match singers with their voices still.

This game suffers from an odd difficult curve. It's not robust enough for the well versed music lover (who should be the target market) and is too difficult for the unversed music lover (who seems to be who they targeted)

EDIT: I just played today's Heardle, and it's maybe the worst one they've ever had. I totally get what you mean.

This is hugely subjective. Today's was instantly recognizable for me allowing me to guess with just the 1s clip. Other days I am familiar with the song but not the opening so I would never be able to guess.

Most days are fun to guess, but some I have no idea. It depends on your personal music history.

I've never played Heardle before, also got it on the first clip. Interested in playing again... have to wait, though.

I've played the game on and off a few times, it can be quite fun if you recognise the song within the first two.

Today's was an unfortunate example of how not fun it can be though

My wife is on a 50+ day streak. I don't know how she does it. Even today's she got it in one second. I watched her do it too.

It has happened a few times where the song is not permitted to be played in my country (Australia). A notable one was Wonderwall by Oasis.

Heardle apologised and allowed her to guess it "correctly" to continue her streak.

I think there is more potential in artist specific ones like BTS heardle. Much smaller bank of songs and more passionate fans.

I love heardle, but damn if this doesn't bum me out. For sure we're going to have to use a spotify login to use features now.

The only thing you get for logging in is that you can listen to the whole song, rather than the first 30s, once the game ends.

Right now yes. Who knows what will come but it'll probably be annoying.

One of the things that I believe I see now is that the guess library is much larger... which I (again) believe suggests a much larger library of songs to draw from.

That's definitely a positive!

I don't get it at all.

Music quiz games are fun.

But why limit to 1 a day? They're going for Wordle-style "cultural trendiness", maybe hoping to draw people to Spotify if a daily Heardle trends on Twitter.

Not gonna happen. Wordle was a flash in the pan. It's already dying.[0][1][2][3] And I doubt a "mee too" product will go as viral.

Spotify bought Heardle, kicked a few countries out that could previously play, and now can't, and took away people's stats. Heardle isn't trending on Twitter, and the Spotify subreddit literally isn't talking about it.

Compare:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/wordle.com/#overview (they abandoned that domain name, switched to nytimes.com months ago)

It's not credible to spend (presumably) millions on this, when they're struggling to roll out Hi-Fi (7+ months overdue), their share price is down 73% from ATH, and YouTube Music and Amazon Music are gaining ground.

Spotify's CEO announced last month to investors that subscription price increases "are part of the strategy", though they're unlikely to do it in the next few months since they saw how it backfired for Netflix. Why not focus more on core service/social features, not gimmicks?

[0]: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/games-puzzle...

[1]: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/why-wordle-is-losing-po...

[2]: https://subredditstats.com/r/wordle (see posts per day, comments per day)

[3]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordle&geo=GB

edit: deleted the 400 tweets claim; seems that website was misleading

Interestingly enough, I concluded Wordle was definitely not dying when I looked at its Google trends just yesterday. A linear decrease in popularity from 100 to 50 is amazing staying power. Of course it's not going to be as popular as it's peak, but the fact that it avoided an exponential death means it's sticking around.

I played Heardle for awhile during the Wordle craze. I stopped playing both about a month ago. I wonder how many users each still has? Congrats to the Heardle devs for successfully selling a Wordle-inspired clone. Who is going to make Movdle to let people guess Movies next? "<honk> Hey - Imma walkin' 'ere!"

I've also moved on from Spotify. Since I am WFH I no longer need music streaming for commutes.

Funny you say that since I created movlie [1]. But it uses screenshots of movies instead since that was easier to source than manually cutting out scenes from movies.

[1] https://movlie.org/

That was a lot of fun. Thanks!

> Who is going to make Movdle to let people guess Movies next?

You're looking for https://framed.wtf/ – today's was particularly easy.

You’re missing out by not playing Angle! https://angle.wtf/

Good for them! Heardle is my favorite of the wordle clones, although some of the recent UK-focused one hit wonders have been brutal =P.

The UK-focused one hit wonders are the only ones I get. :)

Well. Apparently they also made Heardle unavailable in my region (Sweden).

I enjoyed Heardle for many weeks as part of my morning routine. Today I was greeted by a redirect to the new Spotify version of it, which says “Heardle isn't available in your location...”

:'(

Innovation! Efficiencies of Scale! Think about how efficient things will be when THE_BORG owns all and be grateful!

The transition is rocky. I seem to have lost my stats - more than 100 days of results...

Good for the devs, but sucks for me and the group of friends who were informally competing

I'm pretty sure I had this idea 5+ years ago, but I'm not sure if it would have had any traction without Wordle paving the way.

This is pretty crappy as the more open nature of soundcloud that powers it will be lost to lame spotify I'm assuming. But I guess they're saying no noticeable effect for now since playing first min of a song probably no biggie if swapping in Spotify, but hard to believe they'll just leave it be. Bah.

I guess they just stole it away from soundcloud who missed the opportunity to make it official, prob don't have the budget/too out of scope.

Please fix this url, would have taken you two seconds to find the proper link, where did it even come from:

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

maybe unrelated, but if you have an apple music sub you can find a similar game in the shortcuts gallery that uses songs from your library

It should've been me...

Weird URL. The official URL seems to be https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-07-12/spotify-to-acquire-m...

The HTML source code has a canonical link that points to http://pr-newsroom-wp.appspot.com/2022-07-12/spotify-to-acqu... and which does HTTP/301 to HTTPS version. Weird indeed, and it might need fixing.

Isn't that an app engine URL? I know Spotify is on GCP.

Interestingly enough, I can't send the appspot link in FB messenger, it thinks its spam and blocks the message.

huh, I didn't even know it was possible to run WordPress on AppSpot.. I wonder how they deal with image uploads in WordPress

WordPress has hooks to allow pointing the uploads location to a different directory, which you can combine with PHP stream wrappers to have a virtual filesystem.

(Source: I wrote the original WP/App Engine integration back when Google first launched support for PHP; I also maintain a plugin that does the same for S3, for our AWS hosting platform.)

ah! that’s cool - thanks :)

Heardle isn't available in your location...

But, you can listen to millions of full songs and podcasts for free on Spotify.

(I have Spotify Premium.)

Well, I suppose this will not be a problem after the acquisition, once they share a catalog.

instead of fixing the broken web ui, while also removing features that used to exist. they go on acquire a company to boost user numbers and sessions. why have companies lost their way. it seems companies these days try their damn hardest to lose users who give them money and just want a product that gets out of their way.

Agree! The web-player not including features from the desktop application is unacceptable.

I just canceled my Spotify subscription for similar reasons this week. Discovery has become a pain, and I found myself listening to the same 50 or so songs throughout the day from the playlists generated by Spotify. On top of that, the constant push for podcasts has become annoying.

So far I've found great satisfaction using Apple Music.

And the desktop application is itself missing a bunch of features from the mobile app!

You didn't have the chance to use Release Radar or a tones of other new features, maybe you don't even know! Don't try to hide your true reason because Apple Music gives you several free months on the crappy subscription.

Release radar recommended songs that I just couldn't get into honestly. Tried listening to new songs from RR for several weeks without anything too gripping.

What other new features are you talking about? The mix/match with a friend is a fun feature but again, all top 50 songs I've listened to in that playlist for the last few weeks.

> Don't try to hide your true reason because Apple Music gives you several free months on the crappy subscription.

On the contrary, I pay for Apple Music monthly :P

Just another way to pipeline people into robbing Musicians and composers.

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