Like Wordle? Meet Heardle, The New Viral Song Guessing Game

Like Wordle? Meet Heardle, a respectful homage to the viral word guessing game but with a musical twist. Instead of guessing words, the new spinoff game has users guess a song from only hearing a couple seconds of the track.

If you pride yourself on your music knowledge and you’re always annoying your friends on naming every single tune, you should probably start playing. Heardle releases a new “song puzzle” each day, so just like Wordle, becomes part of players’ daily routine.

“I was working for a start-up until December 2021, when they ran out of money, and I was out of a gig,” the anonymous London-based web and app designer behind Heardle said. “I’m still between jobs at the moment, and like everyone in January, I began playing Wordle and posting my scores on a group chat site where my friends would also talk about their scores.”

It wasn’t until he made a joke about creating his own game to guess songs rather than words where it transpired in real life.

“My friend had been a music journalist, and reminded me that I had nothing else going on, so why not.”

Once the first prototype of Heardle was out, it went from eight friends playing the game to over a million people in just a couple weeks.

Similar to Wordle, Heardle gives users six tries to guess the song of the day correctly, with hints only lasting for one second on the first guess to listening for a total of sixteen seconds on the final guess. What makes it user-friendly is that it features a search bar, allowing users to guess songs from its database, making it a tad bit easier to correctly guess if you don’t remember the exact name of the song or artist. The song list is compiled of “the most-streamed songs in the past decade,” so your old-school music database may not come in handy.

As for the clues, Heardle uses SoundCloud as a source to provide the track clips to help guess the daily song. However, some users have reported error messages that prevent them from listening to the sample clips, oftentimes from a user’s location preventing them from being able to listen to the track if it’s blocked in a certain region or network provider.

“So far, Heardle’s primary audience is predictably Anglophile countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada, so not all songs we choose are available in every country – yet – when it comes to intricacies of music licensing and streaming rights,” said Heardle’s app developer.

Despite its early bugs, Heardle seems to be making waves throughout the music community, testing even the biggest music nerds’ knowledge. Want to start testing your music I.Q. and brag to friends on your streak? Play the game online for free here.