Last updated: August 2026
Kpopless is a free daily K-pop music guessing game. Every day you get three new puzzles: press play, listen to a short clip from a K-pop song, and try to identify it before your attempts run out. Each wrong guess reveals a slightly longer clip: 1 second, then 2, then 4, then 7, then 10. You get six tries per song. All three puzzles reset together at midnight London time (GMT in winter, BST in summer).
No account, no signup, no app to download. Your results are stored locally in your browser so they persist between visits. You can share your score as a spoiler-free card (numbers and symbols, no song titles), which is what most players post to Twitter or Discord.
When you open Kpopless you choose a mode, and that mode determines which songs can appear in your daily puzzles.
All four modes share the same daily reset time. Each mode draws from its own curated subset of the library so a song that appears in General mode won't necessarily appear in Boy Groups or Girl Groups on the same day.
The library currently sits at just over 2,000 tracks from more than 200 artists, everything from H.O.T and g.o.d at the 1st gen end to whatever came out last month at the 4th gen end. That breadth is intentional. A library with only recent releases would be too easy for anyone who's been following K-pop for a while, and honestly not that interesting for people who actually care about the older catalogue.
Tracks are added manually. I don't pull in every new release automatically; each song goes through a rough check: is there a usable Apple Music preview? Does the clip start somewhere interesting enough to make a fair puzzle? Are they already well-covered in the library, or would adding these actually improve the variety? A new song from an artist who already has 20 tracks in the game is lower priority than something from a group that only has two or three.
The monthly blog posts cover what got added and why, if you're curious about the specifics.
One deliberate choice: I include a mix of title tracks and B-sides. Title tracks are the obvious ones: the songs that got music videos, the ones you've heard on playlists. B-sides are the deeper cuts that only listeners who've sat with a full album would know. Both have a place. Getting a B-side on the first guess feels different from getting a title track; it's a genuine test of how well you know an artist rather than just whether you've seen their latest video.
Simple version: fewer guesses is better. Get it on the first one-second clip and you're done with a 1. Use all six and still don't get it, and that's an X. A perfect day is 1/1/1. Most days aren't perfect days.
Your result card shows three numbers, one per song, encoded as emoji blocks so you can post it without spoiling anything for people who haven't played yet. Same format Wordle popularised. Most players share to Twitter or Discord.
Underneath your card there's a guess distribution chart showing how everyone else did on those same songs that day. If you needed four guesses on something 70% of players got in one, that's useful information: either you're not as familiar with that artist, or the clip started in a weird place. Both happen.
Results save in your browser and stick around until the next midnight reset. Close the tab, come back in three hours, still there. Clear your browser data, gone forever; there's no server-side backup.
Each day's three songs aren't random in the pure sense. A few rules are baked in: the same artist can't appear more than once in the same day across any mode, recently played groups get lower weight so you're not seeing the same act two days in a row, and there's a rough generational spread built in. A day that's wall-to-wall 4th gen would be too easy for long-timers and too hard for people who mostly know current stuff.
That said, the algorithm doesn't perfectly balance difficulty. Some days are just hard. Three obscure B-sides in a row happens, and it's annoying in the best possible way. A day where all three songs are iconic title tracks feels like a gift. That unpredictability is honestly part of what keeps people coming back; if every day was the same difficulty, it'd get boring fast.
Everyone worldwide gets the same songs on the same day, seeded by date. That's what makes comparing scores fair and sharing results meaningful.
I'm Ned, an independent developer and K-pop fan based in the UK. Kpopless started as a personal project in late 2025 after I couldn't find a good K-pop equivalent of Songless. The full story of why I built it is in a dedicated blog post, but the short version: a friend said the game should exist, I agreed, and a few weeks later it did.
I handle everything: the code, the library curation, the monthly updates, the bug fixes. There's no team, no company behind it. This is a fan project built out of genuine love for K-pop, and the fact that it has active players eight months in is something I'm genuinely proud of.
If you've spotted a bug, want to suggest a song, or just want to say the game ruined your morning commute (in a good way), the contact page is the right place. I read everything, though I can't guarantee a response to everyone.
Every preview clip in Kpopless comes through the Apple Music API. These are licensed 30-second (or shorter) previews, the same clips that play when you hover over a track in the Apple Music web player. They're served directly from Apple's CDN. Kpopless doesn't host, store, or redistribute any audio files.
All music, artwork, artist names, and album titles belong to their respective rights holders: the artists, labels, and publishers. Kpopless has no affiliation with any Korean entertainment company. For full detail on how audio is sourced and how to contact me regarding copyright, see the Copyright & DMCA page.