About MUSIC CUP

MUSIC CUP is a free song world cup game. You search an artist, their catalogue becomes a knockout bracket, and round by round you decide which track you love most. It is made and run by two people in Singapore, and this page says who we are, why it exists and how to reach us.

Who runs this site

Lambda Tech PTE. LTD. is a small company based in Singapore, and MUSIC CUP is one of its products. The company site is lambdaintheshell.com. There is no larger team behind this and no publisher. When you write to the address above, one of the two of us reads it.

Why we built it

We both love music, and we are both hopeless at choosing. Ask either of us for a favourite song and you get a paragraph of hedging, three alternatives and a change of mind an hour later. That is a familiar kind of paralysis, and it is oddly universal, which is what made it interesting.

The thing about a knockout bracket is that it takes an impossible question and breaks it into easy ones. Comparing an entire discography is beyond anybody. Comparing two songs takes a second, and after enough of those seconds an answer emerges that you did not consciously assemble. It is only in the act of choosing that we find out what we actually prefer. That sentence is more or less the whole design brief.

So we built the version we wanted for ourselves. No spreadsheet, no manual bracket, no login. Type a name, and the tournament is ready.

How the public charts work

Every tournament that reaches a champion is counted, anonymously, into the public charts. The formula is deliberately blunt. A song's rank is the number of times fans have crowned it, and an artist's rank is the total across their songs. Nothing else is folded in, no streaming figures, no editorial weighting, no popularity score borrowed from elsewhere. What the charts show is what players actually chose.

Two things follow from that. Chart entries are not our opinion, they are an accumulation of other people's, which is why the winners are so often album tracks rather than the obvious singles. And a chart is only ever as complete as the catalogue behind it, so entries that cannot be matched to a real track in the official music catalogues are left out rather than guessed at, which keeps mislabelled and duplicated titles from cluttering the list.

The charts are rebuilt and republished in batches rather than updated live, so a tournament finished today is counted into a later edition rather than showing up the moment it ends.

What we record, and what we do not

Playing MUSIC CUP requires no account. When a tournament finishes, the result is counted into the charts with nothing attached that identifies you. Your tournament progress lives in your own browser rather than on our servers, which is why it survives a closed tab but not a cleared cache.

An optional account exists for people who want their finished tournaments kept across devices. It is entirely optional, and the game never asks for it. Deleting an account removes the account data and leaves the anonymous chart totals untouched, because those totals were never personal in the first place.

The full detail is in the privacy policy. The terms of service cover the rest.

Music, artwork and rights

Song titles, artist names and cover artwork come from the official music catalogues of the major stores, and the short clips you can play during a matchup are the preview clips those stores provide. MUSIC CUP does not host or stream full tracks, and all rights in the recordings and artwork stay with their owners. If you represent a rights holder and something here needs attention, write to the contact address above.

Where to find us

• r/MusicCup is the official community. Share a bracket, ask for a feature, report a bug.
• X, Instagram and Threads carry announcements.
• [email protected] reaches us directly, and is the right address for press, rights and privacy questions.

A fair share of what the game does today started as a message from a player. Bug reports and feature requests are genuinely welcome.

For business enquiries, including partnerships, sponsorship and licensing, contact [email protected]. That address reaches the two of us directly, so there is no sales desk in between.

New here?

The how to play page walks through a tournament from the first search to the final, and the FAQ answers the questions that come up most. Or you can skip both and start one now. It takes about as long to learn as it does to play.

MUSIC CUP is a product of Lambda Tech PTE. LTD., Singapore. The only official website is musiccup.app.