Path 02 · The listener
That is the whole entry requirement. On this path you choose what reaches your ears, your vote carries the same weight as anyone else's, and your money can go straight to the person who made the song.
Your dial
Every song here wears a mark (a small record of how it was made, written by the maker: see The Maker's Mark). The mark says how a thing was made. Your dial decides what that means for you. Nobody sets it for you.
The most tool-made music your setting lets through:
Human-led
Slide it to 100 and only handmade work reaches you. Slide it to 0 and everything does. Every stop in between is yours, and you can move it any day you like.
Some listeners will keep this at handmade-only for life. Some will open it right up. Both are using the system exactly as intended.
The vote
The People's Chart runs on listener votes: one account, one vote, the rules published, the results public. taking shape
Every January, Australia runs the biggest listener music vote in the world: more than two million votes, enough to fill the MCG twenty times over. Australians vote on music when the vote is real. That habit already exists.
Once a year celebrates the past. A monthly vote surfaces what is being made right now, with every entry wearing its mark so you can see how it was made before you rank it.
Your dial applies here too: filter the chart the same way you filter your listening, and see the full field whenever you choose to open it up.
Straight to the maker
Buying an album pack (a bundle of the songs as files you download and keep) from an artist's own page puts nearly the whole price in their hands. Streaming works differently: on the biggest service, a song needs more than 1,000 plays in a year, roughly one person playing it three times a day for a whole year, before recording royalties (the money paid to whoever owns the recording) switch on at all.
Streaming still has its place: it is how most people find music. The point is simply that when you decide a song matters to you, there is a way to pay for it where the price lands with the person who made it.
Reading the mark
The bands are descriptions, not ranks. Your dial, and only your dial, decides which of them reach you.
Human hands nearly all the way through.
A person drives; tools assist along the way.
The tools generate; a person directs, selects and shapes.
Machine-made, human-published. Rare today, named plainly.
Two more doors
Plenty of listeners end up on the other side of the speaker. If a song has been forming in you, the maker's path shows how to mark it, release it and get paid for it. And if you have a room with a corner for a stage, the venue path is yours.