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Music-based Wordle clone Heardle asks you to name that tune
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 7 March 2022
By now, there are so many Wordle knockoffs, you could make playing them a full time job. Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how you would make that pay. Livestream the collapse of your mental state, perhaps. Anyway, we’re on the subject again because there’s another music-based version of the popular word quiz. Although this time with a twist. The twist being that it’s basically ‘Name That Tune’, but presented in a way that makes it look like Wordle.
So, welcome Heardle, which once a day asks you to guess a song from its intro. To get it first time, you have to enter the correct answer after hearing just one second of the song. Each time you get it wrong, you get to hear a little bit more. If you fail to get it in six goes (or sixteen seconds), bad luck, that’s game over until tomorrow.
According to the app’s makers, “each Heardle is randomly plucked from a list of the most streamed songs in the past decade”. The music itself is seemingly pulled in from previews on SoundCloud Go, with a full 30 seconds of the track available to play once you’ve entered a correct guess.
So, hey, here’s the bit where I get to be a boring party-pooper in an otherwise frivolous story. Because while the makers of Heardle might think that pulling in 30 second SoundCloud previews is all fine and above board – copyright-wise, I mean – it probably isn’t.
It’s not clear what, if any, licences the game has, but the only reference to anything in that domain is a line reading, “Much love (and all the relevant copyright) to all the artists featured”. That does come across a bit like when someone writes “no copyright intended” in the description of an illegally uploaded track on YouTube assuming that that covers them for all eventualities. Or even makes sense.
But, hey, it’s just a bit of fun, maybe the music industry could turn a blind eye – the few hundred quid it’s collected in donations probably isn’t worth suing over. Wait until the New York Times buys it for millions of dollars, at least.
Anyway, you can play it here.
