How Johann Levy Turned a Simple Music Quiz Into a Global Daily Ritual Called Bandle
Bandle, the daily music guessing game that reaches more than 100,000 fans each day, might feel like it was built by a whole team of music nerds. In reality, it’s the handiwork of one French programmer, Johann Levy—plus a few passionate music-lovers he found on Reddit, who help with technical concerns.
“I do get some suggestions every now and then,” Levy explains, from his home in Marseille. He says a Reddit fan even built a machine learning algorithm to help him predict how challenging a song will be.
“From when I started using it a few weeks ago, this algorithm can now predict for any song the percentage of players who would know it in five or fewer clues,” he says. “It’s not an exact science—no prediction algorithm is—but it’s been working pretty well so far: within 15 percent I can know roughly if a song is going to do well.”
How to Play Bandle
In Bandle, players guess a song in up to six audio clues. The track usually starts with just a lonely drum beat, then layers on other elements like bass lines, piano, guitar, or sound effects, each clue sounding more and more like the full recognizable recording (if it passes the algorithm test!). By clue five, you’ll hear the lead vocal, and if you’re still stumped, the sixth and final clue gives you a direct nudge toward the song title. Optional clues include year of the song’s release, genre, and the amount of YouTube views.
Levy quietly launched Bandle in August 2022, aiming to add something unique to the wave of guessing games that captured restless post-pandemic imaginations—like Wordle and its “le”-suffix siblings like Worldle and Heardle. Wordle, which launched in October 2021, became a viral hit and was acquired by the New York Times just three months later. Worldle remains independent and beloved by geography fans. Heardle, launched in February 2022, was famously acquired by a major company and shut down a year later. Levy, for his part, says he plans to keep Bandle proudly independent, and is not selling to the highest bidder.
“For now I’m having fun with it, and there’s a lot of things I want to to add to it while I still have ideas to improve the game,” he says. “So especially not Spotify, if it’s for them to kill the game. There’s no way!”
In fact, Levy only made Bandle his full-time job at the end of 2024, after its unexpected success—thanks in part to a Canadian YouTube influencer named Northern Lion who started playing and sharing it early on.
The Bandle Connection
Even as Bandle celebrates its third anniversary on August 22, it remains a tightly run, homegrown project. Levy still selects each song himself, creates the monthly YouTube playlist after the fact, and updates the Instagram page with visual clues. His wife writes the trivia questions that follow each game and a friend from Reddit creates the MIDI files. “Using Logic Pro, it takes him anywhere from one to three hours to build a song,” says Levy. It’s this handmade feel that is part of what has resonated so strongly with players.
“Something I didn’t really expect when I created the game is that a lot of people managed to connect with someone else like a brother, their partner, or parents just through the game,” says Levy. “I think it’s really cute that people now solidify their bond just through a simple game. I just didn’t think that that would happen, but that’s quite rewarding when I get some some review or email like that. It’s really lovely to hear.”
That bonding has also reached many corners of Berklee Online, where a group of about 20 staffers play Bandle each morning, share their results in Slack, and comment or commiserate on their performances.
The Bandle Reddit community of 1,500 members frequently weigh in with their reactions as well, with a new daily discussion thread each day. Levy is active in the conversation, keeping tabs on which selections have been the easiest or most challenging.
Bandle Milestones
“The easiest song of all time, unsurprisingly was ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen,” he says. As for the most difficult song, that honor belongs to a song called “Iron” by a French artist who goes by the name of Woodkid.
“In France it was big, and so I really thought everyone would know that,” he says, with a laugh, “and that’s one of the worst results ever.”
But when the player isn’t familiar with the song, and has built a six-clue relationship with the individual sounds, and really thought about musical elements like beat, bass line, and synth part, that’s where Bandle can act as a means for music discovery. Levy says in addition to his algorithm, he often decides on songs by just keeping an ear open.
“I do get some suggestions every now and then, and also I hear songs in bars,” he says. “And I check the charts like Billboard in the US.”
Bandle Song Packs
Levy says that as far as his own musical taste goes, he doubts many players outside of France would know his favorite artist, Jean-Jacques Goldman, but a favorite band more familiar to international fans is Placebo. But not even they make the cut.
“Unfortunately, it’s a bit too niche for Bandle,” he says of the British band, after plugging it into his algorithm and realizing it wouldn’t pass. But there’s still opportunities for Levy to put his favorite music into the game, with “song packs.”
Revenue-wise, these genre-specific groups of songs are his biggest earners. These packs also allow him to express himself and dive deeper into genre explorations he personally loves.
“I have a French pack and that was my best pack to put together, obviously, because that’s only songs that I know very well,” he laughs.
He also earns from ads—though he admits he hates dealing with the advertising code. A big chunk of this revenue, however, goes directly to licensing the music, which he says can be complicated and expensive.
Despite all the joy it brings to fans around the world, there’s one person who doesn’t get to experience Bandle the way everyone else does: Levy himself. As the designer and curator, he knows each clue too well to play along genuinely.
“I wish I could play Bandle,” he says. “That’s my biggest regret, really.”
