Now Playing: Six Weeks Of ENCORE, And The First Setlist

Ongoing development has been thick and fast, and its most ambitious feature yet, a community-built playlist called The Setlist is now live. As of this week it has its first two entries: The Rolling Stones' Paint It Black and Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (thanks Stranger Things!) both voted on by the community rather than chosen by us.

This is the first of what will become a monthly ENCORE column. Each month we will look at what has risen to the top of the charts, what your listening habits are telling us, and what we have shipped.

What Six Weeks Taught Us

The first lesson was that people listen far more than they vote, and that listening is the more honest signal. ENCORE ingests scrobbles from your Last.fm account, and within days it was obvious that a handful of dedicated members playing the same track on repeat could push it up the chart on their own. In mid-July we rebuilt chart ranking so that a repeat listener counts once per track rather than once per play. The charts immediately looked more like the community's taste and less like one person's evening.

The second lesson was about voting. When you share a track, ENCORE credits it with an automatic upvote – you clearly like it, you just played it. But that is not the same thing as another member deliberately endorsing it. Those two signals are now separated internally, with a 48-hour block on voting your own share, so the chart reflects genuine endorsement rather than enthusiasm for one's own taste. Visible thumb counts remain a straightforward net score; the ranking behind them is a little cleverer.

Love a track? Then Super Like it! Super Likes have turned out to be the most interesting behavioural lever on the platform. They are deliberately scarce, they carry weight, and because you can hold both a normal vote and a Super Like on the same track they act as a separate, stronger endorsement. We added an "are you sure?" confirmation this month, because members were spending them by accident and then asking for them back.

The third lesson revealed that the music streaming world is still a mess of walled gardens. ENCORE resolves tracks by ISRC and song.link so that you can share from Spotify and a member can listen on Tidal, but coverage varies enormously by service. Deezer now has 11,434 stored links in our catalogue – 85.4% coverage – while Qobuz and YouTube currently have none at all. Qobuz have assured us access to their database soon though! We also merged 64 groups of duplicate title/artist entries in a single pass, preserving every listen, vote, Super Like, comment and favourite attached to them.

The final lesson was a design one. Early on, clicking a track that was streaming right now would bounce you off to another site. That is now fixed everywhere: now-playing titles resolve to an on-site ENCORE track page, and the Play button only appears when there is a genuine inline preview to hear. Discovery should keep you here, not export you.

Introducing The Setlist

The Setlist is ENCORE's community-built playlist of the month, and it is live now – two tracks promoted, and 25 more nominations on the floor waiting for support.

Any member can nominate a track from the ENCORE catalogue. That nomination is a motion, and it sits on the floor until other members second it. Every backer counts, including the person who nominated it. When a motion reaches ten backers it is promoted onto that month's official Setlist. At the end of the month the Setlist is finalised and archived permanently for all to see, and a fresh one begins.

The rules, in short:

• Nominate up to five tracks per month. Seconding other people's nominations is unlimited.
• Ten backers promotes a motion onto the Setlist.
• Twenty-five tracks is the monthly cap.
• Order is by promotion time. The first motion to reach ten takes position one, so there is a real advantage to getting behind a track early.
• Nothing good is wasted. If a motion reaches ten backers after the twenty-five slots are full, it carries over to next month's floor with its backers intact. Motions that never reach the threshold expire at month end and can be re-nominated.
• Guests can look, members can vote. Anyone can read the Setlist and the archive; nominating and seconding require an account.

The first edition is live now and bootstrapped as August 2026 - it's open for nominations from now until 31 August, at which point it is finalised and archived. From 1 September the normal cadence takes over – each month's Setlist opens on the 1st and closes on the last day.

How To Get Involved

You will find The Setlist in ENCORE's tab bar, alongside Add a Track, Discover and Browse. There is a "how it works" panel at the top of the page, the current month's promoted tracks below it, and the floor underneath that – every open motion with a progress bar showing how close it is to ten.

Three ways to take part, in ascending order of effort:

1. Second something. Open the Setlist page, look at the floor, and back anything you would happily hear on a community playlist. It is one click.
2. Nominate from a track page. Every ENCORE track page now carries a "Nominate to The Setlist" button, which becomes a live "on the floor 7/10" pill once the motion is running.
3. Campaign. Nominations are visible to everyone, and floor rows now show comment counts. If you think a record deserves a place, make the case for it in the comments.

As things stand, The Rolling Stones' Paint It Black holds position one and Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill position two, both having hit ten backers within days of the floor opening. Blondie's Call Me is next, one vote short on nine. Behind that sit Dire Straits, Led Zeppelin, Midnight Oil, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, TOTO, Lorde, Neil Young, Gnarls Barkley, Billie Eilish, Radiohead, Underworld, Iron Maiden, Cowboy Junkies and a Max Richter recomposition of The Four Seasons, among others. It is a considerably broader church than the main chart, which is rather the point. Twenty-three slots are still open.

What Rose To The Top

Track of the Month goes to Kraftwerk's Autobahn – which having spent much of the month behind Led Zeppelin's Kashmir is a satisfying result for the German end of the record collection.

The daily chart turns over faster than you would expect. As this piece went to press the Most Popular top five read:

1. Love Over Gold – Dire Straits
2. Ship of Fools – World Party
3. This Mess We're In &ndash PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke
4. All the Things She Said – Simple Minds
5. Rearviewmirror – Pearl Jam

Green Day, Midnight Oil, The Beatles, Foo Fighters and Alice In Chains filled out the rest of the top ten, which tells you the chart is not simply a nineteen seventies preserve. Earlier in the month it was Paul McCartney & Wings holding four of the top ten places on their own, and a week before that David Bowie's Young Americans was untouchable. Over the longer run the most-played artists are The Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen and Dire Straits – which will surprise precisely nobody who has spent an evening in the StereoNET forums.

By genre it is rock first and everything else second: rock accounts for 5,416 plays, pop 3,106, then metal, hard rock, punk and electronica in a long tail. There is K-pop in there too, from some of you. We see you.

Listener Habits

The Insights page now plots every shared listen by hour of the day, and the shape of it is oddly comforting. Listening climbs from a 4am floor of 273, plateaus through the working day at around 1,200 an hour, dips through the middle of the afternoon, then rises again into the evening to peak at 8pm with 1,467 listens – the hour the community sits down in front of the system properly. More than 20,800 listens are now logged across that daily curve, up around 1,500 in the last two days alone.

The catalogue itself now runs to 4,731 artists – nearly 200 more than it held on Monday – built entirely from what members have shared. Nobody seeded it.

Also New This Month

July was a heavy build month. Alongside The Setlist:

• My Finds – the old Favourites surface, rebranded as your personal library, and now exportable as an .m3u playlist or a multi-service .csv. Sending straight to Spotify is the next step.
• Faceoff – a head-to-head mini-game. Two tracks, one winner, or Skip if you would rather not choose.
• Quickfire improvements – tiered deck ordering so you see the right tracks in the right order, plus a proper Skip pass.
• Browse – an alphabetical artist index for people who prefer a library to a feed.
• Track and Artist of the Month – surfaced on the charts page, with a qualification guard so a title only goes to something with genuine positive support behind it.
• Streaming Right Now – a live strip showing what members are playing at this moment.
• Milestones, streaks and tiers – twelve tiers from Explorer to Legend, per-member milestones, a distinct notification if you finish the month as the community's number one curator, and gentle nudges if you drift away.
• A dedicated settings page at /forums/music/settings, where your listening connection now lives with proper setup help.
• Proper Last.fm sign-in – rather than typing in a username and hoping, you now authorise ENCORE at Last.fm itself. That means private Last.fm profiles work for the first time, and there is a "Test my connection" button that fetches your most recent scrobble and shows it to you on the spot. Last.fm is now the single listening source; Spotify remains in the background for track matching and previews, since its own rules make per-member sync unworkable for a site like ours.
• Deeper charts, a redesigned two-column layout that behaves on a phone, and a ranking score badge on every row.
• Setlist polish, already – comment counts now appear on floor rows so you can see which nominations are being argued over, and awarding a Super Like offers to nominate that track if you have not already.

Next Month

August brings the first full Setlist cycle, and we will report on how the community's first playlist came together – what got promoted, what stalled on the floor, and what carried over. Shared votable playlists, direct Spotify playlist sending from My Finds, and album pages are all on the workbench.

ENCORE is free, it is part of your existing StereoNET account, and it works best when more people are listening. Connect a service, share something you love, and go and back a track on the floor.

Try ENCORE Now