A season is three rounds
Three rounds at any league size, because the listening never grows: you hear about 15 songs a round whether there are twenty players or two thousand.
- Round 1 — pods. Everyone is put in a pod of up to 15 people. You submit one song and vote on your pod’s songs.
- Round 2 — elimination. The songs that advanced are collected into pools of up to 15 songs. Nobody submits anything; every player is assigned to exactly one pool and votes there.
- Round 3 — the final. One pool, everybody voting on it.
Nobody is ever eliminated. Songs are. You vote in every round of the season, including the ones your song didn’t reach.
How many songs advance from a pod depends on how many pods there are — the field has to fit into one pool’s worth by the final. A season with a single pod skips the elimination round: there is nothing to narrow.
Submitting
- One song per player per round, and only in round 1.
- You find the song on YouTube and paste the link. There is no search box — the submitter picks the video, so nobody is stuck with our guess of which upload you meant.
- You’re shown what the link resolved to — title, channel, duration — and nothing is submitted until you confirm it.
- You can replace your song any time before submissions close. The old one stops counting the moment the new one is confirmed.
- The video has to be playable embedded. A video that won’t play on the round page is refused at submit rather than left to sit silent while everyone scores it.
- If two people submit the same song, it becomes one entry with both of you credited. It doesn’t appear twice and it doesn’t split its own vote.
Voting
Every group gets a pool of points to hand out: one fewer than the number of songs in it. No single song may take more than 40% of that pool.
So in a pod of 12 songs you have 11 points to give out, and no song may get more than 4. That cap is the whole mechanic: it means you cannot back one song and stop, and every ballot has to name at least three songs it liked.
- You must give out all of your points — a ballot that spends fewer, or more, is refused.
- Whole points only.
- You can’t give points to your own song, in any round. If you’re credited on a song in the pool you’re voting in, it’s locked out of your ballot.
- You can change your ballot as many times as you like until voting closes. The last version is the one that counts.
- A group needs at least 6 songs to be voted on at all — below that the cap stops forcing a spread and one song can take everything.
How songs are scored
Two different questions, decided two different ways — and mixing them up is the most common way a league gets this wrong.
Advancing is decided on raw points, inside your own group. The songs are ranked by points received and the top few go through. No division, no average, no adjustment for how many people showed up: the same voters scored every song in that group, so turnout cannot change the order.
Standings are decided on share, across groups. Your share of a round is your points divided by all the points actually cast in your group. That is what makes a round in a quiet pod comparable to a round in a busy one — every group’s shares add up to exactly 1.
Standings score songs, not turnout. Voting earns you nothing, and a song that’s knocked out stops adding to your total while you keep voting in every remaining round.
Ties
An exact tie on points is broken in this order:
- Breadth — the song on more ballots wins. Eight people liking it beats two people loving it, deliberately: this is a league, not a fan club.
- Intensity — then the song given the cap by more voters.
- A coin flip — seeded and stored, so a recount lands on the same answer rather than a fresh one.
When a pod doesn’t vote enough
A group that draws fewer than 5 ballots, or fewer than 40% of the people assigned to it, does not advance anybody automatically. The scores are still counted and still shown; what stops is the result, and a human looks at it.
Three votes can produce a perfectly tidy set of numbers that means nothing. Rather than publish that as an outcome, the round holds — you’ll see the songs marked held until it’s sorted.
The clock
Each phase runs 3 days and closes at 21:00 UTC — submissions, then voting. The fixed closing time is the point: it’s a habit, not a rolling window you have to recalculate.
A round can be opened off that rhythm, so the deadline shown on the round itself is always the real one. Every countdown on the site runs off the server’s clock, not your computer’s.
Who sees what
- While voting is open, no song shows a submitter and no song shows a score. Not hidden by the page — the code that builds those pages cannot fetch either one.
- Names and points appear when the group is counted. That happens per group, so one pool can be revealed while another is still voting.
- How you voted is never published, at any point, including after the season ends. Your ballot is yours; the link to it is unguessable and nobody else can open it.
- The order songs appear in is shuffled and fixed for the group, so it tells you nothing about who submitted first.
Getting in
Sign in with your email — we send a six-digit code, there is no password. Signing in creates your account; joining the season is a separate press on your account page, so listening never lands you with a ballot you didn’t ask for.
Join while submissions are open and a pod has room and you play that round like anyone else. Join later and you sit that round out — its pods were formed before you arrived — but you vote in every round after it. You score nothing in a round you had no song in, which needs no rule to enforce: standings sum the songs you are credited on, and you have none.
Listening needs none of this. Every finished round plays in full with no account at all.