Answers
How is an artist actually scored?
Five attributes, each with a score, a confidence figure and a written justification — and the rubric changes depending on whether you are assessing an artist, a songwriter or a producer, because those are three different businesses.
Three rubrics, not one
An artist is assessed on songwriting, performance, uniqueness, record quality and star power. A songwriter is assessed on melody, lyrics, versatility, independence and hitmanship. A producer is assessed on musicality, arrangement, sonic execution, versatility and irreplaceability.
They overlap in name and not in meaning. Versatility in a songwriter is the range of rooms they can write in; versatility in a producer is the range of records they can finish. Scoring all three against one list is how a catalogue business ends up being judged on whether someone is charismatic on camera.
Every score carries how sure it is
A number on its own is an assertion. Each attribute comes back with a confidence figure and a sentence explaining what the score was based on, so you can see whether an 84 rests on six self-released singles holding one mix standard or on one guest feature carrying most of the plays.
That is the difference between a tool that ranks and a tool you can argue with. You are not being asked to trust the number; you are being shown the reasoning and invited to disagree with it.
Star power is deliberately separated
It is the attribute most likely to be inflated and the one most people actually decide on, so it is kept apart from the rest of the rubric rather than averaged into a single figure.
Present proof and star shape are scored as different things. Thin evidence lowers the confidence rather than capping the score — so a small artist with a legible origin story and an audience that talks like it is already attached can rate highly, and the file says plainly how much of that is inference.
A tool that folds all of this into one number is hiding the only part of the assessment worth arguing about.
Where this number comes from.
Checkable
Five scored attributes per role, across 3 distinct rubrics for artists, songwriters and producers. Every attribute carries its own confidence figure and a written justification, and star power is excluded from the weighted total rather than folded into it.
The rubric shapes are asserted by the test suite, so the page and the scoring code cannot drift apart — a change to either fails the build.
See it on your own board.
Every new account starts with $5 of credit and no card — enough to put an artist on the board and read the whole file on them.