Daily Crunch: Less than a year after purchasing Heardle, Spotify is shutting down the music game on May 5

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Happy Friday, our crispiest friends!

Over the past few days, we’ve been telling you about all the cool stuff happening at Disrupt. Well, guess what – we’re getting a hardware stage too! Hardware gets its turn in the spotlight at Disrupt 2023…Exciting times!

— Christine And Hey

The businessroundups.org Top 3

• You heard it here: Christine thinks Heardle, the Wordle-esque music guessing game, was too hard, so she gave up a while ago. However, it was a popular game with many people, peaking at 69 million monthly desktop and mobile web visits in March 2022. Now Sarah writes that Spotify is closing the game less than a year after acquiring Heardle. You get six guesses why, but to the tune of tears being shed across the internet.
• Talk about being shut down: Parler, the social media network that was created when former president Donald Trump was banned from other sites, has a new owner. No, not Ye, but digital media company Starboard. Oh, and Starboard has plans to temporarily close it so it can be refreshed. Aisha has more.
• Zoom will now see you: To boost its asynchronous offering, Zoom is acquiring Ireland-based employee communications platform Workvivo. Paul writes that Workvivo had the “remote work revolution” locked in, which is probably what attracted Zoom to it.

Startups and VC

James Murdoch’s venture capital fund Bodhi Tree cut its planned investment in Viacom18 to $528 million, down 70% from the $1.78 billion pledged. Manic reports. Viacom18, a joint venture between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Paramount Global, has not said why Bodhi Tree has cut its pledged investment.

Meanwhile, PBS and a handful of other news organizations have joined NPR in moving away from Twitter, the social media platform once synonymous with breaking news. Taylor reports. NPR announced last week that it would be leaving the platform altogether after Twitter misleadingly added a label to its account reserved for state-run media entities.

And we have five more for you:

4 SaaS engagement metrics that attract investors

Past performance doesn’t always predict future results, but it’s the best place to find customer retention metrics that appeal to investors.

According to Oleksandr Yaroshenko, head of investment and strategy at edtech startup Headway, engagement rates for existing customers are “the best predictors of re-enrollment.”

In this post, he explores gamification strategy and shares ideas for building a “golden cohort” that represents your target audience.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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Big Tech Inc.

Want to read a 10,000 character tweet? Neither do we – oh wait, you said yes. Okay, buckle up, because Twitter is now offering 10,000-character tweets for Blue subscribers, reports Ivan. If you want to see what a 10,000 character tweet looks like, we got you, boo. How about a 10,000 character businessroundups.org article? We picked one up for you from the archives.

Moving to Washington State, where Uber and Lyft drivers won paid family and sick leave. Rebekah writes that the state senate passed a law making it the first in the country to offer this kind of benefit to ride-hail drivers.

Here are five more for you: