About Museek

Museek is a daily song-guessing game. Five songs, five tries each, starting from a fifth of a second. It takes three to five minutes and there is one round a day.

How the songs are chosen

Museek plays this century: every song is from 2000 or later. A song is dated by the earliest year we can attribute it to, so a remaster does not make an old record new, and a song that charts again decades on stays a song of the year it came out.

Within that, the pool is built from published charts rather than from anyone’s taste, so a song earns its place by having genuinely been a hit somewhere.

• Billboard Year-End Hot 100, every year from 2000 to the present — about a hundred songs a year, all of them big enough that someone will recognise them.
• Apple Music’s daily Top Songs for several countries, so the game does not stop at last year. A current hit only counts in full once it has held its place for a week.

Each chart line is matched to a recording, preferring the studio version over live takes and rejecting karaoke and tribute pressings outright. Every song is then scored on where and how often it charted, and that score is discounted by age — a number one from 2003 is not quite the easy guess it once was.

Rounds are built up to two months ahead, so that no artist appears twice in a fortnight, no song repeats within a year, and a round is never five songs out of the same decade. Where the ten seconds start is chosen by measuring the preview’s loudness, so a round never opens on silence.

Credits

• Song previews and cover art are provided courtesy of iTunes and are streamed directly from Apple. Museek is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple.
• Chart placements are read from Wikipedia’s Billboard Year-End articles, available under CC BY-SA. Chart positions themselves are facts, not creative work.

Getting in touch

Corrections, rights enquiries and everything else go to the contact page.