The published rulebook
House Rules
Ordinary people made basically everything: hip-hop was born at a rec-room party in the Bronx, the most-sampled recording in history was a bar band’s throwaway B-side, and “Louie Louie” was one sloppy take that outlived its critics. The League runs on the same bet — ordinary people, taken seriously, under rules. Here they are, published and enforced.
I. The Drop
- §Monday at 00:00, the week's chart drops: a piece written by machine, delivered as MIDI, chord sheet, and a reference rendition. Nobody — including the officers — has heard it before it drops.
- §Entrants spend the week arranging, practicing, and recording their own performance: any instrumentation, any genre translation, any tempo, voice or no voice. Reharmonization is welcome; the melody must remain recognizable.
- §Entries close Friday 23:59. Open voting runs through the weekend. Results are read Sunday at 20:00. All times are published on one canonical competition clock and shown to you in your own timezone.
- §A normal week runs itself: when one Drop's results are read, the next Drop is on the books for Monday. No hand cranks the machine.
- §It is a cover league for songs that never existed. The platform licenses each chart for performance; you own your recording of it.
II. Listening is the price of entry
- §An entry is not locked into the bracket until its entrant completes the listening quota: 10 blind pairwise votes (fewer in small rounds), plays verified.
- §A play is verified at 30 seconds or 80% of the track, whichever is shorter, measured server-side. Seeking does not count. Skipping does not count.
- §Unlocked entries may appear in matchups but are not ranked and cannot place.
- §Every entry therefore buys guaranteed, verified listens for every other entry. This is the economy. There is no other fee.
III. Voting
- §All voting is blind, pairwise, and randomized: two renditions, one choice. No names, no artwork, no bios, no play counts, no permalinks to individual tracks.
- §Matchups are assigned by the house, weighted toward under-heard entries. You will never judge your own entry, and never the same pair twice.
- §Voting runs from the chart drop until results night. Identities are sealed until the reading.
- §Voting is capped at 30 matchups per member per round — the quota is 10; everything beyond it is a gift. Exhaustive judging is not a strategy.
- §Vote trading, brigading, and ring behavior are treated as misdeclaration: disqualification, forfeiture of rating, public record.
IV. The entry
- §Every upload is loudness-normalized to −14 LUFS on ingest. Voting is never a loudness war.
- §Renditions run between 20 seconds and 8 minutes.
- §An upload lands as a draft: you hear exactly what voters will hear, then confirm. An unconfirmed draft is not in the bracket.
- §Confirmation sends your take to the door: the House admits every rendition into the pool before any voter hears it. The door is a floor against junk, not a judgment of taste. A turned-away entry gets a recorded reason and one appeal.
- §You declare a performance category at entry — full production, solo instrument, vocal arrangement — and matchups pair like with like wherever the pool allows.
- §You attest at entry that the recording is your own performance of this week's chart. The attestation is recorded. Lying is the offense.
- §One entry per member per Drop. Replace or withdraw any time before entries close; your quota progress stands. Votes cast on a replaced or withdrawn take are void — the room judges only what's actually in the bracket.
V. Provenance
- §The Chart League is the founding division: AI writes, humans render. Your performance of a piece that did not exist until Monday is its own proof of process — there is nothing to pre-fake and no back-catalog to launder in.
- §Open-entry divisions follow as the League's moderation muscle grows: Division G (fully generated) and Division A (AI-assisted) with disclosure at upload, then Division H (human-performed) behind the full escrow-and-challenge apparatus.
- §"Certified human" is the graduation ceremony, not the opening claim. A wall is only worth building once we can hold it.
VI. Standing
- §Ratings persist via Elo (start 1200, K=32), applied on results night in vote order. Matchmaking will pair newcomers against newcomers; nobody gets fed to an established act in week one.
- §An entry needs at least 3 counted votes by the reveal to be placed. An under-judged rendition is listed as "not enough votes to rank" — it is never defaulted to last.
- §Placement, badges, and the permanent archive are the prizes at launch. Rituals recruit communities; jackpots recruit fraud.
VII. The House
- §Any voter may flag an entry in a matchup — not this week's chart, broken audio, offensive content. Flags route to the House queue; the flagger's identity is never shown alongside the flag. Frivolous flagging costs reputation; the ledger remembers who filed what.
- §The House disqualifies only with a recorded reason. A disqualified entry leaves matchmaking immediately; votes already cast against its opponents stand.
- §Vote-fraud heuristics run on every vote — rate limits, timing patterns, address clustering. Suspect votes are quarantined, counting nowhere until the House reviews and restores them. Machines flag; humans decide.
- §Every integrity action — flag, disqualification, quarantine, restore, appeal, and any hand on the round clock — is written to an audit ledger. The League must be able to show its work.
- §A disqualified performer may appeal exactly once, in writing. A human owes a response before the next round opens.
- §You warrant that every entry is your own performance. Impersonation vocals — cloned voices of named artists — are banned in all divisions. Rights-holders may send takedown notices to the registry; entries under a valid notice are removed pending counter-notice, and repeat infringement means a ban.
Versioned, published, and revised in the open. Lying is the offense; the machinery exists to catch lies.