how this game-inventor created a music discovery machine

What do you get when you combine a love of gaming and a love of music? DJ-turned-game-inventor Anuj Dhawan has the answer, and it’s called BeatMinute. The super-fun daily game serves up a selection of known and beloved tunes for players to guess, as well as some new favourites. We caught up for a chinwag with the clever cookie to chat about how he came up with the game, how he put it together, and why country music is the hardest genre to pin down.

Tell us about BeatMinute and where the idea for the game came from. BeatMinute is a fast, fun daily music game, and the aim of the game is simple – you gotta guess what song is playing! Get a high score by guessing right and guessing fast. Consecutive correct guesses get you a ‘boost’ which doubles each time, and wrong guesses halve or break your boost. There are hundreds of songs from every decade, so you’ll find new and old tracks you love or have never heard of. A new game is created and the leaderboard resets at midnight and you can share your scores with your friends with one click.

I always enjoyed the “daily” format of gaming – small doses of fun each day, with low stakes and a social element to them. I was trying to find if there was a way to combine the New York Times’ daily system with a music game – and BeatMinute was born.How has your own love of music helped shape BeatMinute? I was a DJ for about 15 years, and during the later years I loved playing top hits at most of my gigs. It just ended up being more fun playing songs that everyone knew and could sing along to. I knew I wanted to include that feeling into the game, the discovery/re-discovery of songs. And I knew I wanted it to be a fast-paced daily game. It took some iteration before it felt like there was “flow”, where one song plays right after the other so it feels like you are listening to a mixtape.

How do you choose which songs are in the game? I wanted every daily game to have at least one song you know and love, and hopefully one song that you’ve forgotten about but remember that you loved! So, I’m going through the Billboard Top 100 of the last 50-plus years of music and adding them all to the database. After that I’m going to start working on theme-specific daily games, like One Hit Wonders, 00s R&B/Hip Hop and Triple J Hottest 100. How have you tested and refined the game? I’m building this game using Lovable, so the whole process has been highly iterative and scrappy. I started by sending it to one of my best mates Wyatt (who does a bunch of film, AR and XR development) for the first few rounds of gameplay and UI feedback. I then created a WhatsApp group with some friends for beta testing. It’s been really helpful getting real feedback, ideas and bug reports from people you trust. Of course, there’s always one person in any WhatsApp group you regret inviting (he knows who he is) but at the same time he helped reveal some exploits that I then quickly patched up.

How do you think games like yours can change the way people engage with music? Nowadays it feels like the algorithm of any music streaming service just takes over and guides you down a rabbit hole of sameness because their ultimate aim is to have you stream more. So, there’s a high risk of attrition if it delivers you music you don’t like. I wanted to create some randomised chaos in this game to counteract this. Novelty is good!

I’m hoping that as people play more, they’ll discover new and old songs that they love. At the end of every game, the player can see the whole song list from the day’s game, and I’m creating YouTube playlists from every daily game as well so you can listen back to the entire mixtape from yesterday. What I’m really aiming to do is for this to be a music discovery engine for indie artists as well. Does any particular song come to mind that is the hardest to get right? Not a song, but definitely a genre – country music is tough! Since I’m using worldwide Billboard Top 100 songs at the moment, there’s a lot of American cultural influence in the songs. Australia doesn’t really get into country music that much, so any time the randomisation engine has picked up more country music, we start to see lower scores for that day. But then we end up having some American players who absolutely crush it! It’s fun to see the same people top the leaderboard and then appear near the bottom the next day.

To busy your digits with BeatMinute, head over to their website, or have a squiz at @beatminutegame on Instagram.