Getting Started

What BandJam is

BandJam is a music competition you play with people you know. Somebody sets a theme, everybody picks a song that fits it, and then everybody votes. Points add up over a season and one person ends up on top.

The whole thing runs on songs you already listen to. You do not need a Spotify account, an Apple Music subscription, or any other music service to play. Those only change how you listen to the results.

The shape of a league

A league is one season of the game. It has a roster, a list of themes, and a set of rules chosen by whoever created it.

Each theme becomes a round. Rounds run one at a time, in order, and the league finishes when the last one is scored. Your points carry across every round, so a bad week is survivable and a good one is worth chasing.

League

One season, one roster, one leaderboard.

Round

One theme. Submit, then vote, then see results.

Crew

A group that sticks around between seasons and can run many leagues.

One round, start to finish

A round opens with a theme, something like "a song that sounds like summer" or "the best song from a bad album". While the submission phase is open you pick a song that fits and send it in. Nobody can see what anybody else picked.

When submissions close, every song in the round goes into a playlist and voting opens. You spend a fixed number of upvotes and downvotes across the songs, and you can guess who submitted each one.

When voting closes the round is scored, the leaderboard moves, and the results screen shows you who picked what, who voted for what, and who read the room correctly.

Joining a league

Most people join with an invite. Someone sends you a link that looks like a join address with a code on the end, you tap it, and the app opens with the code already filled in. You still have to confirm, because joining shares your name, your photo and your scores with everyone else in the league.

If the link does not open the app, the web page it lands on has a button that hands the code over. If you do not have the app yet, tapping a store button copies the invite so the app can pick it up the first time you open it.

You can also type a code by hand. Codes look like ABCD-EFGH. The app is forgiving about how you type it, so lower case and missing hyphens are fine.

Public leagues can be found and joined without a code at all, from the find a league screen.

Your first round

Read the theme before you go looking for a song. The theme is the whole game, and a technically great song that ignores it tends to do badly.

Watch the deadline. A submission that arrives late does not count, and if the league asks for more than one track, sending in fewer than the full number means none of them count.

Vote every round, even when you do not care much. Skipping the ballot costs you real points, and the way it costs you is explained under Voting and Scoring.