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The charts

Why your song slipped, and what it takes to stay up there.

Guide 06 · 3 min read

An artist on a stadium runway, the crowd lit gold to the back of the stands
Somebody is number one right now The charts

There is a Top 100 and a chart for each of the five genres. They all recalculate every six hours, and every artist above you is a real person.

Pop
Rock
Rap
Country
EDM
Five genre charts, and the Top 100 over the top of them

A genre shares one audience

Your song does not have a score that quietly drains away. Every song competing in a genre is sharing the attention available, and your position is your slice of it.

So nothing pushes your song down except better songs. A track from six Paydays ago holds its place until somebody beats it, and the same track can drop hard in one Payday when three people all release something stronger.

Release day is loud

A new song gets a burst of attention when it lands, and that fades over the next few days back to what the song is really worth. It is a splash, not a plan. What it is good for is timing: a quiet Payday gives a song you are proud of a much better start.

Watch your genre chart

You compete for attention inside your genre, not against the whole game, so being a name in your genre is reachable in a first season. The Top 100 is a longer project.

Staying up there

Holding the top takes a catalog, not a single. One enormous song puts you at number one until somebody beats it. A run of good songs keeps you there, because now they have to beat all of them at once.

And one ladder that is not a chart

There is a second ladder that has nothing to do with how well a song was written. It ranks artists on real people hearing them, out in the world, and it pays like the charts do.