Duolingo, the app that failed to teach everyone French and German during the 2020 Covid lockdown, is welcoming a new member to its nocturnal avian family. The company has announced that it is acquiring NextBeat, a UK-based mobile gaming startup specialising in music licensing.

If you have to ask ‘why’, then you haven’t been paying attention. The language learning app has branched out in recent years, offering customers everything from chess to math lessons, with a brief stopover in the world of musical instruments. One of the newer additions is music lessons.

Making notes for Duolingo

Exactly how the acquisition of a mobile gaming studio will alter Duolingo’s experience isn’t specifically detailed, but it will “make our Music course and the entire Duolingo platform more delightful, immersive, and effective,” says the company’s chief business officer, Bob Meese. Sounds… lovely.

The newly-acquired staff will bring talents in “game design, user retention and monetization, sound design, and music licensing” to the service’s Music app. Likely, end-users will only be concerned with a few of these skills. Monetisation is never a fun experience for anyone handing over the money in question.

Taking its music offering in a gaming-centric direction could work out for the owl mascot and its subordinates. Guitar Hero famously drove an interest in music lessons, while Ubisoft’s Rocksmith made actual guitar skills attainable via a game environment. It all depends on Duolingo’s execution here, and whether it can sidestep the pitfalls that have struck other apps that have branched out into mobile gaming, only to later reverse course.