Everyone brings one song to a theme. Everyone listens without knowing whose is whose. Everyone votes, the points are counted, and the songs that did best go through to the next round. Three rounds and a season is done.
The one rule everything else defers to
You can hear an entire round without an account, on any platform. Not a preview, not thirty seconds — the whole thing.
Every other music league we’ve played makes you sign into a particular streaming service before you can hear a note, which quietly turns “come listen to this” into “come sign up for this.” So round pages here are public and playable, and sending someone a link is the entire pitch. If a feature would force a login to listen, it doesn’t ship.
An account only exists so you can submit and vote.
Why YouTube
It is the only catalogue broad enough to hold what people actually submit that also plays without an account. That is the whole reason, and it comes with a real cost we’d rather name than hide: the submitter has to find the video and paste the link themselves.
The upside is that nobody is ever stuck with our guess. There is no search box, so no round ends with a live cover standing in for the studio take because a lookup picked the wrong one.
Blind, structurally
While a round is being voted on, no song shows who submitted it and no song shows a running score. That isn’t a template that leaves the names out — the code that builds those pages has no way to fetch them. It was built that way on purpose, because “remember not to display this” is a rule that holds until the day somebody adds a page.
Submitters are revealed when their group is counted. How you voted is never published — not after the round, not after the season, not ever. The reveal is the fun part; a public record of who scored your friend’s song a zero is not.
Nobody is eliminated. Songs are.
Your song can go out in round one and you still vote in every round after it. There is no bracket you get knocked out of and no week where you have nothing to do — the listening is the point, and the standings score songs rather than attendance.
How it runs
- Roughly fifteen songs a round, whatever the league’s size. The listening burden stays flat as it grows.
- Submissions run for a few days, then voting for a few days, closing at a fixed time. The round page always shows the real deadline.
- No passwords, ever. You sign in with a six-digit code sent to your email.
- Points, ranking, tie-breaks and the rest are written out on the rules page — with the actual numbers the site enforces.
Who runs it
Crate Clash is run by Beacon Light Investments. What we collect and why is in the privacy policy, and the terms cover the rest.
Best way to see what it is: the round that’s running now, or everything that has finished.