Everything below is how the game genuinely runs: what Clout is, how an artist gets priced, what happens in the Arena, and what you walk away with when a call of yours lands.
Most people in this scene are carrying around a list they can't do much with. The artist you found sitting at three thousand monthly listeners, the tape you dropped in the group chat that nobody opened for eight months, the name you had been saying long before the feature and the playlist that made everyone else start saying it back to you.
The problem is that none of it is provable, because by the time an artist actually blows up, everyone in the chat remembers being early.
CloutX exists to fix that particular annoyance, by putting a timestamp on the call while it still counts as a call.
Clout is the only thing you spend here, and every new account opens with 10,000 of it. Finishing your starter draft on day one adds another 2,000, and after that it accumulates the ordinary way, through daily check-ins, referrals, and getting your artist submissions listed.
Beyond those, the number moves for exactly one reason, which is whether your calls worked.
If you run your balance down to nothing, nothing happens to you. You are not locked out and you are not removed from the game, you just have to sit there and look at it, which is arguably worse.
The board is every artist currently listed on CloutX, sorted into four tiers by how big they actually are at the moment. Tier is a description rather than a rating, so it tells you where someone sits in the scene today, not whether they are worth backing.
2,000 and upNames your cousin knows. Stable, slow to move, and rarely a shock in either direction.
300 to 1,999Up to 5xArtists on the come up, with the playlists and features to show for it, and a price that already reflects most of that.
30 to 299Up to 50xDark horses, where the scene knows the name but the numbers haven't caught up to it yet.
1 to 29Up to 500xPure wildcards with barely any public footprint. These are the cheapest entries on the board and carry the highest chance that nothing ever comes of it, but an Unknown that climbs the whole way can return up to 500x.
Tiers are not permanent. Artists get promoted when their numbers sustain a jump, and they slide back down when they go quiet for long enough.
An artist's price is a score built out of public data, drawing on Spotify monthly listeners and Instagram followers, weighted together, along with how quickly that audience is growing.
Growth rate counts for more than raw size, which is a deliberate choice. It is the reason a small artist doubling their listeners can outrun a large artist adding what amounts to a rounding error, and it is what makes being early worth something here rather than just being a personality trait.
Prices refresh nightly, so your holdings can look different by morning. Newly listed artists sit at Pricing Tonight until their first update comes through, after which they open for trading. Nobody is sitting behind a desk deciding who deserves a bump, because the pricing runs on data going in and a number coming out.
It is worth being upfront about the limits of that. Public data isn't flawless, counts sometimes get reported late, and a source can lag by a day, which means a price occasionally sits behind where reality already is. It corrects itself on the next cycle, but if you have ever wondered why a price didn't move on the night an artist obviously popped off, that is usually the explanation.
A price on CloutX is a game score. It is not a valuation, not a market, and not a stake in any artist or their catalogue.
You find a name, spend Clout on it, and hold a position at the price you paid, and that entry price is what everything gets measured against afterwards. You can sell whenever you want, with the difference landing back in your balance either way.
There is no cap on how many artists you can hold at once, though there is also no prize for holding forty of them, so it pays to pick your spots.
The market is you reading the data. The Arena is where you put that read up against something, and it runs in two modes that resolve on the same nightly cycle as everything else.
Both modes cap what you can stake at 5% of your net worth, counting your cash balance plus whatever your holdings are currently worth. Both lock at 11:59 PM IST, and both settle overnight when the new prices land.
Every day the exchange puts up a Slate of somewhere between three and seven artists, and everyone playing sees the same one. The artists on it are chosen from those whose price moved between 1% and 15% that day, whether up or down, so it is always drawn from names that are actually doing something.
For each artist on the Slate, you are calling one thing: whether tomorrow's move will be bigger or smaller than today's.
The move continues in the same direction and gets larger.
It shrinks, stalls, or turns around entirely.
Each side carries its own multiplier, shown to you before you commit, and locked to your bet the moment you place it. Those multipliers come out of the artist's recent behaviour, mainly how consistently they have been moving in the same direction over the last seven days, how large today's move already was, and their own history of following one move with a bigger one.
Here is the part worth knowing before you play: momentum is rarer than it feels. Across the data so far, MORE only comes in around a quarter of the time, because prices tend to pull back towards the middle after a big day. That is why MORE pays out heavily and LESS pays out thin. It also means there is no lazy strategy waiting to be discovered, since the odds carry a small margin that makes both "always MORE" and "always LESS" quietly unprofitable over time. The only edge available is picking the specific artists who are going to break the pattern.
Come out of a day ahead and your streak carries forward.
Duels are you against another player, played out asynchronously, so nobody has to be online at the same time as anybody else.
You can start one by challenging someone directly with their username, or by posting an open challenge to the marketplace, where anyone can see the stake and the terms and claim it if they like the look of it. Both players put up the same stake, and the winner takes the whole pot.
Every Duel comes with its own constraint, generated fresh, which is the part that makes them interesting. It might restrict you to Underground and Unknown artists, cap the combined price of your lineup, limit you to artists who rose this week, or rule out the obvious names who have already run. Roughly one in five carries a twist on top, like a bonus for the cheapest artist in your lineup or a penalty if any of your picks fall.
Within that constraint, each player is dealt their own randomly drawn pool of artists to work from, which means the two of you are never picking from the same shortlist. You cannot land on identical lineups, and neither of you can just grab the three obvious names, because your opponent is looking at a different set of options to yours.
From your pool you draft exactly three artists and rank them by conviction, weighted against how much each of them moves overnight.
Those weights are fixed and shown openly, because ordering your lineup correctly is meant to be part of the skill rather than something you guess at.
If nobody claims your challenge before the lock, you get your stake back in full. If both of you accept but neither drafts, it voids and both stakes are returned. If you draft and your opponent accepts but never turns up to pick, you keep your own stake and take half of theirs, with the remaining half returned to them.
A squad is your crew on the exchange, the group you actually argue with about this stuff anyway. You can only belong to one at a time, so there is no joining five of them and claiming whichever one happens to be doing well that week.
Inside a squad you can see what your people are backing and when they backed it, which turns the whole thing into a running argument with a scoreboard attached. It also means your bad calls are visible to the exact people most likely to bring them up months later, which is either the best or the worst part of it depending on the week you are having.
Every position you open is timestamped, and your profile keeps the full record of it: what you backed, when you backed it, what it cost you, and where it stands now, alongside your picks, your taste, and your recent moves.
The leaderboard updates daily and settles the question of who actually has the best ear on here. When a call of yours hits, there is a share card waiting with your name and the date on it, which compresses about six months of telling people you were right into something you can just post.
The board is not finished and it never will be, so if an artist you rate is missing from it, send them in. When our crew lists a submission, the first person who sent that name gets credited as the scout for it and picks up 200 for calling it.
A few artists sit on the board as Legacy, which means they are honoured there permanently and not available for trading. Some names are not for playing with.
Artists and their teams can put themselves forward on the For Artists page.
It is not gambling, it is free to play, and it stays free. It is not investing either, and nothing here is financial advice of any kind.
What it is, is a game about taste, and specifically about whether you can hear something before the numbers do and then prove that you did. Full detail lives in the Terms of Service.
