The Explainer
How the league actually runs.
A plain-English account of the rules, the methodology, and the calendar.
Every Friday at 4am ET (9am UK), we grab the latest New Music Friday playlist from Spotify. Those 100 tracks become the pool for the week. What Spotify picks is what you draft from.
The draft window is twenty hours. Opens Friday at 4am ET (9am UK). Closes Saturday at midnight ET (5am UK). Miss it and you're out for the week.
Each drafter picks ten tracks. Once the draft closes, picks become public so you can see what everyone else went with. Scores stay private until Thursday, so nobody knows who's winning until the final reveal.
We record play counts straight from each track's Spotify page. Once a week: final results land Thursday evening. It's manual and human- verified, which means the numbers match what Spotify actually shows the public.
Thursday evening, the leaderboard ranks every drafter by their total play count across all ten picks. Weekly winners get recorded. Season standings update. The all-time records page tracks the highest scores ever posted.
A season is thirteen weeks. Four seasons a year, roughly matching the calendar quarters. Highest cumulative score across the thirteen weeks takes the season.
- What about tracks released earlier in the week and added to NMF?
- Sometimes Spotify adds tracks to the playlist that were released earlier in the week. Those tracks keep their existing play counts, which gives them a head start. Experienced drafters watch for this.
- What if Spotify changes the playlist mid-week?
- The pool is locked at 4am ET (9am UK) Friday. Anything Spotify changes after that doesn't affect scoring.
- How do you know the play counts are accurate?
- We record them straight from each track's public Spotify page. Anyone can verify the numbers.