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Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game it bought last year – will sunset on May 5 as it aims to focus on music discovery
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- Authors
- Sarah Perez
- Published
- Apr 14 2023
- Word count
- 688 words
I swear large companies are like children. They pick up companies that interest them, break them into pieces, and when they are no longer interested they completely abandon them.
That's just how things go. You try things out, if they don't work, you don't continue them. In the analogy, unlike a young child, there is an underlying goal. When Meta bought Instagram and Whatsapp, it certainly did not abandon them, as they turned out to be very valuable for the company. After buying Oculus, it ended up renaming the whole company after it.
We are in a cycle of high interest rates, so there are more experiments being shut down, but such is the way of things. Many of these startups would have simply gone bankrupt had they not been bought, as it doesn't really matter if the external capital they require to continue comes from a specific company like Spotify after buying them or general financial institutions.
I'll counter that by saying:You bet it does. Big companies aquiring small companies to add to their portfolio is how we got in this tech crisis to begin with.
Small firms dying due to being outcompeted/being unprofitable is a good thing in a market economy. Big players need competition to keep them honest, and growing too large lets them create giant vertical monopolies that then jack up exorbitant rates.
Apple buying Darksky is my prime example for "should not be allowed." Probably because I'm especially bitter it killed my API access. But Facebook buying Insta, Occulus, and Whatsapp also qualifies. Google should have been bannned from all aquisitions 15 years ago. Microsoft 28 or more. IBM probably closer to 50.
We say "thats just how things go" ....but we have the (theoretical) power to say "this isn't a beneficial effect for our economy/society" and then make laws to rectify it.
No company should be allowed to grow unfettered indefinitely. At a certain point it should be shattered to allow for growth of competition.
Those are really wildly different cases, though. Facebook and Insta is the most serious from a regulatory point of view because it's Facebook, a social media platform, buying a direct competitor.
When you move to Apple and DarkSky, regardless of the disappointment from DarkSky customer's, there's a very weak competition angle. Apple technically competed with DarkSky with Weather, but that's not even a revenue generating part of their business, and they were also partially the platform that DarkSky were on (and therefore also made money when DarkSky made money on iOS)
Then when you get here, Spotify is not even close to being a competitor to Heardle. It actually makes plenty of sense for Spotify to buy Heardle - a major heardle they would have is with music licensing, and Spotify's got that covered.
The negative implication is that Spotify buying Heardle is what sealed its demise, but that's a not an obvious conclusion. Heardle was a product of the Wordle craze, and from Google trends, it is all but irrelevant shortly after Wordle mania calmed down.
The purchasing of Heardle by Spotify would not trigger regulatory action by any country in the world.
The "no vertical integration" angle. Though yes in the particular case of Heardle its hardly earthshattering.
Apple buying more properties to strengthen their closed ecosystem (potentially shuting out formerly viable competition in the process) is also anticompetitive. If you are large enough, you should be forced to build improvements, not buy them.
The larger Apple/Google/Microsoft/etc grow, the harder it is to compete against them. Spotify itself will eventually be aquired by Amazon, Apple, Google, or Microsoft, mark my words.....and regulators will (given trends so far)...pretty much ignore it.
And it will be yet-again that much harder to compete in the market.
If your company is dealing in the billions...you shouldn't be able to aquire or merge with other companies. Sink or swim on your own merits.
This wasn't a startup though, this was just a joke that got out of hand. Still, it could have shut down for any number of reasons. API changes, financial burden from its growth, the one man behind it just tiring of maintaining it, but it was never intended to make capital, go big, be successful. Just "ha, yeah, that'd be funny... heck, where'd all these people come from?"
If like the article claims, the aim of the acquisition was to improve music discoverability then it was a bad decision from the start. You don't go to Heardle to find new songs or artists, you go because they will play a song/artist you already know and have some familiarity with.
I don't partake, but my mates that do have been complaining that since the Spotify acquisition they've been trying to use it to promote music which makes it not interesting, for the reasons I wrote above.