Higher or Lower

No song titles to remember

The artist quiz asks you to recall a specific artist's ten biggest tracks, which you either can or cannot do. This asks something easier and stranger: not what a song is called, but how many people have played it. You are not being tested on memory, you are being asked to guess at scale, and almost nobody has good intuition for the difference between 600 million plays and 1.4 billion.

The surprises are the point. A song that defined a summer can sit below an album track nobody talks about, because playlists and streaming habits do not care what was culturally significant.

How the pairs are chosen

The pool is 949 tracks, every one past 500 million Spotify streams, drawn from artists with 20 million or more followers. Between them they account for over 1.4 trillion plays.

Consecutive tracks are always between 1.2 and 3 times apart. Wider than that and the answer is obvious; closer and it is a toss-up rather than a judgement. The same artist never appears twice in a row either, since ranking two songs within one discography is a different and easier question.

Frequently asked questions

How are the stream counts worked out?

They come from Kworb.net, which estimates a track's all-time total from how long it spent in Spotify's daily top 200. Spotify does not publish exact per-track play counts, so these are approximations rather than official figures. Nothing is adjusted here to make a round harder or easier: whatever Kworb reports is what you are shown.

How often do the numbers change?

The catalogue is re-crawled weekly. Streams only ever go up, so a pair that was close last week may not be close this week, and the same two tracks can swap places over time.

Which songs can come up?

Tracks estimated at 500 million plays or more, by artists with at least 20 million Spotify followers. That is 949 tracks from 110 artists. The floor exists because comparing two songs you have never heard of is a coin flip rather than a question.

What counts as a good streak?

Pairs are chosen so the two tracks are always between 1.2 and 3 times apart, which rules out both obvious blowouts and near-ties. Guessing at random gets you about one in two, so a streak of 10 means beating chance roughly a thousand times over.