You are shown a song with its release year. The next song arrives without one, and you call it: did this come out before or after the one you can see? Get it right and the new song becomes the known song, and the chain continues. Get it wrong and the day is over.

Eleven songs make ten calls. Ten out of ten is a perfect day. There are no lives, so the tenth call is worth exactly as much as the first and considerably more nerve.

There is always a right answer

Two songs from the same year would make a comparison with no true answer, so the chain is built to exclude them. The day's eleven are drawn from 236 songs spanning 1960 to 2024, shuffled from the date, and any song whose year matches the previous one in the chain is skipped over. A tie can never appear.

Worth knowing, because it changes how you play: if you are fairly sure two songs are contemporaries, they are not. One of them is at least a year off, and your job is to work out which way.

Tactics

• Date the production, not the song. A gated reverb snare puts you in the eighties whether or not you have heard the track before. The sound of a record is usually better evidence than your memory of it.
• Anchor on the known year, not on your feel for the decade. The question is never “when did this come out”. It is only ever “is this side of 1994”, which is a much easier question and the one actually being asked.
• Beware the reissue instinct. A song you know from an advert is dated by its original release, not by the year you first heard it. That gap breaks more chains than anything else in the game.
• A near-miss is a coin flip, so take it. When the known year and your estimate are within a year or two, there is no cleverness left. Guess and move on rather than talking yourself out of a correct first instinct.

Streaks

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

Where the dates come from

The 236 songs are a curated list with hand-checked years, using the original single or album release rather than a later remaster, deluxe edition or chart re-entry. Where a song was released in different territories on different dates, the list uses the first commercial release.

Edge cases get cut rather than adjudicated. If a song's date is genuinely arguable, it does not belong in a game whose entire mechanic is which of two things came first.

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.