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\u2019s the handiwork of one French programmer, Johann Levy\u2014plus a few passionate music-lovers he found on Reddit, who help with technical concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI do get some suggestions every now and then,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom 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,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not an exact science\u2014no prediction algorithm is\u2014but it\u2019s been working pretty well so far: within 15 percent I can know roughly if a song is going to do well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Bandle<\/a>, 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\u2019ll hear the lead vocal, and if you\u2019re still stumped, the sixth and final clue gives you a direct nudge toward the song title. Optional clues include year of the song\u2019s release, genre, and the amount of YouTube views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Levy quietly launched Bandle in August 2022, aiming to add something unique to the wave of guessing games that captured restless post-pandemic imaginations\u2014like Wordle<\/a> and its \u201cle\u201d-suffix siblings like Worldle<\/a> and Heardle<\/a>. Wordle, which launched in October 2021, became a viral hit and was acquired by the New York Times<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor now I\u2019m having fun with it, and there\u2019s a lot of things I want to to add to it while I still have ideas to improve the game,\u201d he says. \u201cSo especially not Spotify, if it\u2019s for them to kill the game. There\u2019s no way!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, Levy only made Bandle his full-time job at the end of 2024, after its unexpected success\u2014thanks in part to a Canadian YouTube influencer named Northern Lion who started playing and sharing it early on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n