Layer 02 · The count
A chart where the listeners are the method. Once a month, members vote for the songs they actually love. Every entry wears its Maker's Mark, the counting rules are published before the first count, and the results are public. taking shape
Why votes
The country's famous January countdown drew more than two million votes in its 2025 poll. Picture that as a queue: more people than the MCG holds, twenty times over, each one lining up to say which songs mattered to them.
Play counts can be inflated by bots (software that pretends to be many listeners at once). A vote tied to a member account, one person, one account, is the hardest signal to fake at community scale. Not impossible; hardest. That is the right foundation for a chart built by a community.
A play is something you do half-listening. A vote is a choice you make on purpose. Counting votes turns the chart from a measurement of habits into a thing the listeners build together, month after month.
How it works
You sign up once. Each month, your account can give each song at most one vote. The account is how one person stays one person in the count.
Each song arrives wearing its Maker's Mark (the record of how it was made) and the band that mark lands in. Voters see it; nobody's method is graded by the chart itself.
How votes become positions is written down and published before the first count runs. If the method ever changes, the change is published before it applies.
The monthly results go up for everyone. If an entry is excluded, that is public too, with the reason attached.
If someone disputes a mark or a count, the question is worked through with evidence, and the outcome is published either way.
Why the method matters now
By mid-2026, more than half the tracks uploaded to one major streaming service (the kind of app that plays music on demand) each day were fully machine-made: around 90,000 a day. That is roughly a new song every second, around the clock, every day of the year.
Volume is not the enemy here. Volume is exactly why curation by real listeners matters now. No algorithm has to pick for you when a community of actual people, voting under published rules, can do the picking in the open.
Context
Since 31 August 2026, the ARIA charts exclude recordings that are "not substantially human created". That is their line to draw, and they have drawn it plainly.
Songs on either side of that line still deserve somewhere credible to stand, and their makers somewhere to be seen. This chart takes the whole dial: handmade, human-led, AI-led and autonomous entries all compete in the same count, each wearing its mark, with the listeners deciding what any of it means to them.
Demonstration
A browsable sample drawn from the first catalogue being marked: three released albums by an Australian artist, live on the major streaming services. Bar length shows each album's track count.
A demonstration of how marked entries will look, not a live chart. These are albums in release order, not chart positions, and no votes have been counted.
Later lanes
Once the voted method holds, a second lane will follow: a played chart built from public platform data and paid data feeds (subscription services that report what songs are actually being played). Those feeds run at around A$180 to A$195 a month (US$129 to US$140, converted at A$1 = US$0.7162, 28 August 2026). on the horizon
The order is deliberate. Votes come first because they are the signal a community can stand behind from day one; plays join later, as a second view rather than a second master.