Questions people ask

Chart Topper is a music career game for iPhone that you play against other people. You write songs from a hand of cards, record and release them, play shows, and compete for positions on charts that update every six hours. Everyone else on those charts is a real player.

Yes, and it is the point of the game. There is one world, one season and one set of charts, shared by everybody playing. The artists ranked above and below you are other people, not opposition the game generated to keep you company.

Most of them are single player: you grow your own numbers in your own world, and the charts are made up. Chart Topper is the same fantasy played competitively. A genre only has so many listeners, and they are shared out between the songs competing in it, so a position you take is one somebody else does not have.

Yes. The optional purchases are creative extras, like AI cover art and sung song clips, and an ad-free upgrade. Nothing you buy makes your songs chart higher, so nobody outranks you by spending.

Yes. You can start a record label together or join one, pool what you earn into a shared headquarters, and put three of you in a band that writes and tours as one act. Labels battle other labels, and winning together is its own ladder, from the underground league to the majors.

No. Your cards are the ingredients you write with, and the game shows you what a song is worth before you commit to it.

A few minutes, a couple of times a day. The world moves in six-hour Paydays and nobody can do more between Paydays than anyone else, so time at the screen is not what decides the standings.

Your released songs keep earning and the charts keep moving. You cannot lose progress overnight.

Nothing is taken away from you. There are no streaks to break, no daily rewards to miss and nothing that expires while you are gone. Your songs carry on earning and your artist rests up, so a week later you open the game to a bigger number than you left, and one screen that tells you what happened.

Not on the board that matters most to you. As well as the main charts, everybody gets an entry class: the players who started around the same time you did, ranked against each other. It is the winnable one, and it is where a first season is really played.

Only to a better song. Nothing pushes your track down on a timer, so a song you are proud of can chart for Payday after Payday.

Yes. A song can be given a 30-second clip that is actually sung, and you can publish it to its own page on chart-topper.com with its cover art and words. Published songs also play on Chart Topper Radio, on the site and in the game. Publishing is your choice, one song at a time, and you can take it down at any point.

Yes, for the parts of a song a game cannot write for you: the sung 30-second clip and the cover art are generated when you ask for them, from a few choices you make. The clip is where a song gets its words, so its lyrics come back with it rather than being written separately. The game itself is not AI: the cards, the scoring, the charts and the other players are all real. Anything generated is labeled as AI-made wherever it appears outside the game.

iPhone. There are no plans for other platforms.

It is the best thing that can happen to one. A listener who stays to the end counts as a real listen, and every Payday the artists who drew them get paid for it in the game. New listeners are what count: replaying your own song does nothing.

It borrows the music career fantasy from Project Rockstar and the build-your-own-deck idea from Dominion and Slay the Spire, but it is far gentler than either, and unlike most music career sims it is played against other people rather than alone.