The pool is the one hundred tracks on Spotify's official New Music Friday playlist, the editorial flagship of weekly release day. At midnight Eastern Time every Friday, our scraper visits the public playlist URL and captures the full tracklist as it stands. Those one hundred tracks become the draft pool for the week. No additions, no substitutions; the playlist as Spotify published it.

The draft window is twenty-four hours. It opens Friday at midnight Eastern and closes Saturday at midnight Eastern. Picks made after the close are not accepted. There is no waiver wire and no late entry; the scarcity of the window is part of the discipline.

Each drafter selects ten tracks from the pool. Picks are public the moment the draft window closes, so other drafters can see your slate. Scores remain private until Thursday's close, so nobody knows who is ahead until everyone is judged at once.

New Music Friday Fantasy League's research team records the final play count of each track on Thursday at 4pm Eastern Time, by visiting each track's page on Spotify and noting the cumulative play count displayed there. This is a manual, human-verified process, conducted twice per cycle: once on Monday for the midweek buzz report, and once on Thursday for final scoring. We chose this methodology because it produces more credible data than algorithmic scraping and reflects the play counts as Spotify actually displays them to the listening public.

Thursday evening's leaderboard ranks every drafter by total play count across their ten picks. Weekly winners are recorded, season standings update, and the all-time records page tracks the highest weekly scores ever posted on the league.

A season is thirteen weeks. There are four seasons each year, aligned roughly to the calendar quarters. The drafter with the highest cumulative score across the thirteen weeks is the season champion; champions get a feature in our end-of-season recap.