Daily music guessing games after Heardle
Heardle closed in May 2023, about a year after Spotify acquired it. The audience never went anywhere, so it is worth being clear about what the options actually are.
For the background rather than the alternatives, see what happened to Heardle, the history of Wordle and the format it started, or how Actorle works.
Which daily music games are still running?
Every game below was checked by hand on 3 August 2026. Listicles for this query are full of games that closed years ago, which is the main reason this list exists. If one of these has since gone, it is a mistake and worth telling us about.
| Game | What you guess | Audio |
|---|---|---|
| Bandle | The song, one instrument at a time. Each guess adds another instrument to the clip | Yes |
| Songless | The song from a snippet that starts at 0.1 seconds and grows with every wrong guess | Yes |
| Lyricle | The song from its lyrics, revealed a line at a time | No, but it uses lyrics |
| Spotle | The artist in 10 guesses. Each guess reveals hints such as debut year, genre and nationality. About 1,000 artists | No |
| Featurle | The artist who appears on all the listed albums. Guessing a collaborator reveals the songs they share | No |
| AlbumGuessr | The album of the day, from progressive clues about the artist, genre and year | No |
| Heardle Decades | The Heardle format kept alive by someone else after Spotify closed the original. Separate boards by decade, genre and artist | Yes |
| Heardle (heardle.info) | Another surviving Heardle, with a daily board plus decade, genre and unlimited modes | Yes |
| Songdle | The song from its intro, a new one each day, with an unlimited mode and boards filtered by genre or artist | Yes |
| Musicle | The song from a clip, in six guesses, with a hard mode and a paid ad-free tier | Yes |
| Musicianle | The musician from their own discography. Years and genres stay visible, titles are masked, and naming a collaborator unmasks their releases. Eight guesses, 6,809 musicians | No |
Why the other lists are not much use
The two pages ranking highest for "games like heardle" when this was checked on 19 August 2026 have the same two problems, and between them they are the reason this page exists.
They are padded with games that are not about music. One, titled "20 Best Heardle Alternatives", lists twenty games. Eleven of them are word, geography or weather puzzles: Wordle, Semantle, Waffle, Word Search, WordGuessr, Lingo, Wordalot, Cloudle, Globle, SpellTower and Typeshift. One is about films, one about footballers, one about video games. Six of the twenty are music games.
They miss most of what is actually running. Between them, those two lists recommend the same five music games. Neither mentions Spotle, Bandle, Songless, AlbumGuessr, Featurle, Heardle Decades or heardle.info, every one of which was live and playable on the day this was checked.
That is not a complaint about effort. It is what happens when a list is written once and never re-opened, which is also how this page ended up recommending Swiftle long after it stopped being a game. The difference is meant to be that this one gets re-checked and says when.
Closed
Heardle shut down on 5 May 2023, fourteen months after launch and about ten months after Spotify acquired it. Most of the artist-specific and decade-specific spin-offs that followed it are also gone. The full story is here.
Swiftle, the Taylor Swift version, is gone. swiftle.io now serves a general interest blog with no game on it. We had it in the table above as still running, which was wrong, and archived copies of that domain from April 2024 and February 2025 show a holding page and an unrelated business rather than the game. So it had already gone well before we said otherwise. We could not establish the date it actually closed, and we would rather say that than invent one.
Every link above was checked on 19 August 2026 and answered with the game still on it. Three honest notes on the list. Musicianle is ours, so treat that row accordingly and judge it yourself. A game answering its homepage today is not proof it is still publishing a new puzzle daily, which is the one thing a single check cannot confirm. And this list is only worth reading if it is re-checked, so if you find an entry that has gone, tell us and it moves to Closed.
Why the audio format is fragile
Heardle worked by playing the opening second of a song and adding a little more with each wrong guess. It was a genuinely good format, and it depended entirely on the right to stream commercial recordings. That is also why Spotify was the natural buyer, and why the clones that appeared afterwards have tended to be short lived: the music rights are the whole business, and nobody without a catalogue deal is on solid ground.
Anything built on audio clips inherits that fragility. It is not a criticism of the format, just a description of what holds it up.
Guessing from a discography instead
There is a different way to build the same daily puzzle: use what a musician released rather than how it sounds. A career is surprisingly identifiable from its outline alone. Debut year, the genres it moved through, how long the gaps are, when the output stops or restarts.
| Release | Year | Genre |
|---|---|---|
| ×××××××× ×× ××× ×××××× | 1966 | - |
| ××× ×××××××× ×××× | 1967 | psychedelic |
| ×××××××× ×××××× | 1970 | bluegrass |
| ×××× ×× ××× ××××× | 1973 | classic rock |
| ××××× ×× ×××× | 1989 | arena rock |
A 1966 debut, psychedelia the following year, a swerve into bluegrass, and a long run into arena rock. Plenty of people can name that band from those five rows without hearing a note.
The practical advantage is that discography data is public. Release titles, dates, credits and genres live in open databases like MusicBrainz and Wikidata, published under CC0. A game built on them is not one licensing decision away from disappearing.
What the formats trade off
Audio clip games
Immediate and visceral, and they reward recognition rather than knowledge. You either know the intro or you do not, which makes them fast but gives a player who does not recognise the track very little to work with.
Lyric games
Fun, and heavily constrained. Lyrics are tightly protected, so these games are usually limited to short fragments or operate in a grey area.
Discography games
Slower and more deductive. A board can be reasoned through even when the first look means nothing, because the years and genres narrow the field. They tend to reward breadth of music knowledge over instant recall.
Where Musicianle fits
Musicianle is the discography kind. One musician or band a day, their release history with the titles masked, no audio at all. Guessing another musician who is credited on one of those releases reveals that title, and every wrong guess uncovers another letter, so a board always moves forward.
It is free, needs no account, and resets at midnight UTC so everyone plays the same board.
Prefer to see the mechanics first? The how to play page walks through a real board, and the archive has every past puzzle with its answer.