Heardle is ‘Name that Tune’ for Wordle fans:  Ranking the 50 Genre Categories Based on My Performance

(September 7, 2024).  As a one-time Wordle enthusiast and all-time music lover, discovering the game “Heardle” felt like finding the perfect mash-up of both those things. 

If you haven’t tried it yet, Heardle (web address: heardledecades.com) is a game that throws you into a “Name That Tune”-style, Wordle-like challenge.  With 50 genre categories to choose from (you don’t have to play all 50), each one gives you six snippets from the first few bars of a song (about 15-17 seconds total), and you have six chances to name both the title and artist.  It’s deceptively simple… until you find yourself questioning if you’ve ever even heard the song in the first place, which happens more often than I care to admit!

Heardle is powered by SoundCloud, which gives it the huge catalog of music to choose from, although you don’t need a subscription to play it.  Infrequently, due to licensing issues, a song may not be available in this country, so the category is disabled for that day, but that happens rarely. 

The easy part of Heardle is, once you begin typing your guess, the game populates the multiple-choice field with possible answers using your letters.  You can type either the first few letters of an artist or song title and it fills out the rest, normally with about eight plausible options for you to then pick which answer you want.

The hard part is you have to at least have a clue which song or artist it is you’re listening to and you only get six short snippets of music to get it right!

A good friend of mine — also a huge music enthusiast — discovered the game and shared it with me sometime in 2022 or ‘23.  We’ve been competing nightly ever since, sharing our scores virtually over the phone and trying to outdo one another.  Recently, we decided to make things interesting by tracking our battles by month.  Since we started that this spring, he’s won the months of April, May and August — the latter by a landslide score of 18-10 (with three ties) — and I’ve taken June and July.  I’m currently up 4-1 — with one tie — in September (as of the 6th).  Needless to say, we’re both extremely competitive and neither of us takes it well when we lose.  

The game’s 50 categories — there’ll soon be even more — are a hodgepodge of music genres based on styles ranging from pop to rock to hip-hop to new wave to electronica to disco to country.  As the game’s creator hails from the UK, there’s a Northern Soul category devoted to R&B songs that appear to have been hits in that country (not necessarily the USA).  There are even categories devoted to musicals, movie soundtracks, and TV themes, again with a bit of a British slant.

For chart enthusiasts there are games for one-hit-wonders, plus No. 1 songs from the USA, from the UK, and from the 1980s (either country).  Speaking of decades, each one is represented from the 1950s through the 2010s with its own category, and with the game’s creator adding new fields every month, I’m sure the half-completed 2020s will be represented soon.

As I mentioned, the game’s creator is from the UK, so he’s devoted a few artist-specific categories to British superstars like Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, George Michael/Wham!, Erasure and Queen.  But even the Brits can’t escape Taylor Swift’s dominance of all things music, so there’s a category devoted to the American pop queen as well.  (Spoiler alert: I’m not as much of a Swiftie as readers of this blog may have thought, based on how poorly I perform in her category… more on that in the stats below.)

Did I mention I was competitive?  Recently, I stumbled upon the game’s stat tracker.  It shows you how well (or not so well) you’ve performed in each genre, which got me thinking: why not rank them based on my own success (or, more accurately in a few cases, failure) rate?

These stats aren’t a reflection of how well I perform against my opponent, but how well I do in each category based on how many answers I guessed correctly over the past year, which is how far back the stat tracker goes.

Here’s a tip: if you get started late at night and you’re encroaching on the midnight hour, you can change your phone’s clock to an earlier (western) time zone to allow yourself more time before the game resets to the next day’s songs.

Here’s the rundown of my personal performance for the past 12 months.

Legend:

Rank. Category – My correct answer percentage (won/played).  And a little note about each category. 

1. USA No. 1s – 98.1% (313/319).  Apparently, I know my American charts pretty well, especially the toppers.
2. Love Songs – 92.7% (177/191).  I’m a bit of a softy when it comes to ballads, and this category is pretty easy.  Sappy, but easy. 
3. 1980s No. 1s – 91.9% (295/321).  I know every No. 1 song from the 1980s in THIS country.  The UK?  Not so much.  I’m sure the 26 misses came from across the pond. 
4. Canada – 91.5% (43/47).  This is a newer category that’s not so much about Canadian artists as it is about songs from any nationality that have hit big across our northern border.  
5. Yeardle – 91.0% (292/321).  As the name implies, you hear the song, you have to guess the year it came out.  I’m sure most of my misses came from the pre-Rock-and-Roll era of the 1940s and 50s (yeah, they go back that far), or the 21st century.
6. Motown – 87.6% (296/338).  Ok, this is not just a rehash of the Temptations, Four Tops, Diana Ross/Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder.  You have to know your Elgins, your Junior Walker, your Rare Earth, your Velvelettes, and that one song that Frankie Valli made for Motown that I can never get right!
7. 1970s – 87.0% (274/315).  Easy peasy, you’d think, until they start getting into the British punk stuff or those early ‘70s hits that I was too young to remember in the first place. 
8. Rock – 85.3% (291/341).  Surprisingly, my opponent and I do pretty well in this category, which offers a healthy diet of pop songs disguised as rock 
9. Greatest Hits – 83.5% (213/255).  This is a potpourri of songs from any genre that were either huge chart hits or legendary in their own right. 
10. Disco – 83.4% (252/302).  This is a deep dive into all things disco, or even post-disco, and not just that pop stuff from the late 1970s that dominated disco and hastened its early ‘80s demise. 
11. 1950s – 82.4% (253/307).  Music was pretty simple in the 1950s.  The intros were shorter, and the lyrics usually blurted out a song’s title before the first 15 seconds were done, which is how I explain my “B” performance in this category. 
12. Reheardle – 79.6% (249/313).  This is a rehash of Heardle songs from earlier games.  It’s like a Heardle’s Greatest Hits category where every song has been played before.  In other words, we should do better here.  
13. Australia – 78.4% (40/51).  Like the Canadian category, this is one devoted to songs that were hits in the land down under, not necessarily by Australian artists. 
14. 1 Hit Wonders – 77.1% (242/314).  These are one-hit-wonders in the UK, not necessarily the USA, so some of the answers have been a bit surprising. 
15. Covers – 76.6% (249/325).  As the name suggests, these are covers of songs by other artists.  The arrangements will throw you off, so you hope like hell that a lyric line will creep in before the six snippets are done. 
16. 1990s – 75.8% (244/322). Admittedly, I’m not a huge ‘90s guy, a little more flannel and angst than I was prepared for, but somehow this is beating the ‘80s category (see 19 below) that I thought I’d master.  I guess recency has its advantages. 
17. 1960s – 74.3% (202/272).  Recency doesn’t explain how the 1960s are beating the ‘80s.  So I’ll defer to the notion that music was simpler then, where titles of songs were uttered early enough to make the answers much easier.  (Spoiler: no Beatles songs have appeared, presumably because of licensing issues.)
18. Girlpower – 73.8% (62/84).  Songs either sung or led by women (groups or solo).  So, yes, ABBA and Chic, oddly enough, have appeared here.  
19. 1980s – 73.4% (224/305).  This is not your daddy’s ‘80s category.  Yes, there was a British Invasion here in the U.S., but if you’re not up on Heaven 17, Squeeze, and (very) early Simple Minds — among other obscure fare — you’ll be humbled. 
20. Pop – 71.7% (137/191).  This is British pop, again not necessarily my forte, but there is some overlap with American hits. 
21. Pride – 71.2% (235/330).  Songs for the LGBTQ+ community, so there’s a heavy dose of dance, divas and “out” queers here.  
22. UK No. 1s – 68.7% (206/300).  I’m slightly better at No. 1s from across the Atlantic than I am at American hip-hop, which is saying something. 
23. Hip-Hop/Rap – 68.1% (224/329).  If hip-hop had ended in the 2000s, I might have a higher win percentage here.  
24. Super 70s – 66.3% (226/341). This is a deeper dive into the “me decade,” and, as such, I lose more often than I care to admit. 
25. 2000s – 64.6% (217/336).  Not surprisingly, my knowledge of music began to wane dramatically at the turn of the century. 
26. Lyrical – 61.7% (214/347).  Sans music, a narrator reads lyrics — sometimes in dramatic fashion — and you have to guess the song (and its artist).  The narrators change from time to time, and there’s a female one whose slow,  deliberate readings take so long, you hardly get to the song’s third line before your guesses are up.  Frustrating!
27. Emo – 60% (3/5).  As the numbers suggest, this dark-themed category just started this month.  The 60% success rate will NOT hold up, I promise you.
28. George Michael/Wham! – 50% (171/342).  During a recent road trip, I binged on Wham! and George Michael as a study session for this category, which often repeats some of the same songs over and over.  The studying helped secure a few victories, but clearly there are some obscure hits by the late Wham! singer with which I need to be more familiar. 
29. Country – 48.2% (165/342).  A near-.500 batting average in country music is surprising.  But after a while you get to know the voices of legends like Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, and their song titles are usually self-revealing.  It helps that I’m also a Sam Hunt fan.  
30. 2010s – 47.1% (155/329).  Again, my performance declines with each passing decade.  I’m sure the 2020s will be even worse once that category begins. 
31. Blitzed – 46.7% (85/182). Not sure what this category is, because it seems to be all over the map.  Hmmm, maybe I just answered my own question. 
32. ‘80s Flip – 43.7% (152/348).  Flip is perhaps the most interesting category of all: they play a tune in reverse, and you have to guess it.  (!esrever dias I, seY)
33. Musicals – 42.5% (136/320).  There aren’t enough Grease songs to make me do better in this category.  But I’m getting there, if only because there are only so many musicals Heardle’s moderator bothers to keep drawing clues from. 
34. Electronica – 41.0% (25/61). Another relatively new category, this one is not as techno as the name might imply.  
35. Northern Soul – 40.0% (36/90). The “northern” here refers to Northern Europe, I think.  Or maybe it’s Northern U.S.  Whichever it is, clearly my soul is missing a beat.  
36. New Wave – 39.5% (124/314).  Thankfully, what the moderators consider “new wave” often wades into ‘80s euro pop classics or techno artists whose sound I’m familiar with, rendering this a category where a lot of guesses are made by finding the correct artist and then using a process of elimination to get the right title. 
37. Movies – 38.0% (60/158). My friends know I’m not a big movie guy.  Thankfully, if you know the year a song came out, you can narrow down the movie choices by just typing the year, which the moderators have mercifully appended to each movie title.
38. Queen – 33.0% (114/345).  The artist-specific categories will humble you, as you’ll see when you scroll further down this list.  Advice: brush up on your Flash Gordon soundtrack, which this category draws from regularly.
39. Rolling Stones – 32.6% (100/307).  Admittedly, I thought I’d do better with the world’s greatest rock band, given how much I love their music.  Clearly, this result means there’s even more Stones deep catalog I need to explore.  
40. Eurovision – 29.4% (32/109).  My nightly opponent has studied for this one by playing Now…That’s What I Call Eurovision on repeat.  Needless to say, he beats me regularly in this category devoted to the annual European song competition (it helps that he took French in high school).
41. TV Themes – 25.4% (69/272).  As with the movie category, I’m handicapped by the fact that I don’t watch a lot of TV, at least not after say 1990.  But every now and then they go with ‘70s and ‘80s classics, which keeps me afloat — barely — in this daunting category.  
42. Taylor’s Version – 24.2% (22/91).  See, I told you previously that I’m a Swiftie for the blog’s purposes only.  There’s some truth to the notion that all — or most — of her songs sound alike.  IJS
43. Elton John – 20.2% (33/163).  I’m one of Elton John’s biggest fans. I have no comments about this dismal showing.  
44. Duran Duran – 18.7% (63/337).  See above comment about Elton John. 
45. Indie – 16.7% (1/6).  It’s still early for this category alternately dubbed “College Radio,” but something tells me it’ll dwell in this percentile for the duration. What exactly constitutes indie music anyway?  It is a sound?  Or is it lack of corporate label affiliation?  Or both?
46. Pet Shop Boys – 12.0% (40/332).  See Elton John and Duran Duran above.  
47. Metal – 10.5% (35/333).  Not surprisingly, this is the worst category that we bother to play.  It’s probably at the bottom of my opponent’s list as well.  Our first guess usually involves the word “death” followed by “hell.”  Yes, this category is that bad.  
48. Depeche Mode – do not play.  We recognize where our limitations lie.  So, we skip this nightly.  
49. Erasure – do not play.  See Depeche Mode above.  
50. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – do not play. See Erasure and Depeche Mode above.

Ranking each genre category by my performance has just made Heardle even more interesting. Now, in addition to the nightly competition with my buddy, there’s the added goal of improving some of those underperforming categories (I’m looking at you Eurovision and Death Metal).

And there are half a dozen new categories on deck for the near future, including those devoted to duos/duets, the Glee television series, and Christmas tunes.

Guess I’ve got some more tunes to tune into!

DJRob

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog and on Meta’s Threads.

DJRob (@djrobblog) on Threads

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