Ten artists arrive one at a time. Each one has to go into a slot from 1 to 10 before you are shown the next, and a slot you have filled is filled for good. By the time you meet the tenth artist you have one slot left, whoever they turn out to be.

Everyone gets the same ten in the same order each UTC day, drawn from a pool of 181 artists across seven genres.

There is no correct answer, and that is the game

Nothing here is scored against a chart position or a streaming count. When you finish, your ten are compared against everybody else who played that day: the crowd's consensus order, worked out from the average slot each artist was given, and the percentage of players who put each artist exactly where you did.

So a low agreement score is not a wrong answer. It means you rate somebody the room does not. Whether that is taste or contrarianism is between you and the room.

The real decision is slot 1

The first artist is the hardest call in the game, and it is worth thinking about before you start rather than in the two seconds after their name appears.

Put a good-not-great opener at 3 or 4 and you keep both ends free. Put them at 1 because they are the best you have seen so far, and you have spent your top slot on information you did not have. Nine artists are still coming and the pool contains acts almost nobody would rank tenth.

Tactics

• Play the middle early. Slots 4 to 7 are cheap to fill and expensive to have left over. Ending with only slot 1 or only slot 10 available is how a ranking you would defend turns into one you would not.
• Decide what you are ranking before artist one. Personal taste and perceived greatness give very different orders, and switching between them halfway produces a list that agrees with nobody, including you.
• Expect the pool, not the artist. Seven genres are represented, so if the first three are all pop, the back half is unlikely to be. Leave room.
• Commit. There are no take-backs by design. Deliberating does not improve the call, because the information you want is the one thing the game will not give you.

Want it without the stakes?

Blind Ranking Unlimited is the same mechanic with random artists and no daily limit, no crowd comparison and nothing recorded. It is the one to play when you want to argue with somebody in the room rather than with the internet.

You are shown a music video and its view count. A second video arrives without one, and you say whether it has more views or fewer. Get it right and that video becomes the known one. Get it wrong and the run ends.

Eleven videos make ten calls, and ten out of ten is a perfect day. Everybody gets the same eleven in the same order, worked out from the date.

The numbers are live

View counts are read from the YouTube Data API when the puzzle loads, not stored in the game. So they are the real current figures, and they move. A video you narrowly called yesterday may have passed the one you compared it against.

The pool is 157 hand-picked music videos, deliberately mixing all-time monsters with merely enormous ones. If every pair were Despacito against an album track the game would be trivial, so the list is built to keep comparisons close.

What people get wrong

• Chart success is not view count. A song can be everywhere on radio and stream well while its video does modest numbers. What you are ranking is the video, and the video is a different product.
• Age beats popularity more often than you expect. A 2012 video has had over a decade to accumulate. A huge 2023 release is often still behind something you had half-forgotten.
• Watch for kids and karaoke. Nursery-rhyme-adjacent and endlessly-replayed videos accumulate views in a way that has nothing to do with whether anybody rates the song.
• The gap between one and two billion is enormous. Once you are in that range, small differences in your intuition are worth hundreds of millions of views. Anchor on the number you can see rather than on your sense of scale.

Streaks

Your streak counts consecutive days played and lives in your own browser rather than on an account. Miss a day and it resets. Clear your site data and it goes too, which is the trade for not making you sign up for anything.

The other four dailies

This is one of five. Artistle is the guess-the-artist game, Medley is Connections for songs, Before or After asks which of two songs came out first, and Daily Blind Ranking makes you rank ten artists without knowing who is coming. Missed one? The archive goes back to each game's launch.