Answers
What does an AI A&R scout actually do?
It takes a written brief describing the artist you are looking for, works the open web against it for about half an hour, and files a ranked list of people who match, with the evidence behind every name.
A brief, not a filter
The brief is written in the language you would use to a colleague: the sound, the territory, the stage, the kind of following that would interest you and the kind that would not. It is compiled into something the scout can work with rather than matched literally, because most of what you actually mean is not a field in anybody's database.
It then goes out and reads. What comes back is a ranked slate with a paper trail — for each name, where it was found, what was claimed, the sentence that claim came from, and how confident the finding is.
A preference is not a filter — with one exception
A ceiling like "no more than 250,000 monthly listeners" is a preference. Someone over it is ranked down rather than thrown out, capped at about a third of the available ranking penalty, so the artist above your ceiling you would have signed anyway still comes back.
The exception, stated plainly because it is the one place that rule does not hold: an artist who is already famous by streaming-popularity measures is dropped outright when the ceiling you set is below half a million. If you are hunting under a quarter of a million listeners, that condition is true for every brief you can write — so genuinely famous artists will not appear, whatever the ranking would have done with them.
What it is not doing
It is not signing anybody, and it is not contacting anybody. It files names and reasons; every action after that is yours.
It is also not running unless you deployed it. Scouts are hired, edited, paused and discharged by the operator — the assistant can draft one and explain one, and cannot put one in the field.
Where this number comes from.
Checkable
A scouting sweep runs 28 minutes at the median and 2h 07m at the 95th percentile. A soft ceiling is capped at roughly a third of the ranking penalty; an artist already famous by streaming popularity is pruned outright when the ceiling is under half a million listeners.
Durations are elapsed wall-clock on completed runs over 10,430 metered operations between 23 August and 2 September 2026. The ranking behaviour is a property of the qualification step, asserted by the test suite so the page and the code cannot drift apart.
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.