Scouts / standing order
Describe who you want. Wake up to a slate.
Write the brief once and put it on a weekly order. It works the open field overnight and files ranked candidates — with the evidence behind every rank — while you are asleep.
Scouting footprint
Natural Earth · signal density
Artists scouted
5
21
41
The brief
Move the ceiling. Watch the brief rewrite itself.
Genre, territory, role, audience size, the signals that decide it and the ones that rule a person out. Set them here. The directive rewrites as you go, and the parameter object under it is the one a scout is issued — not a picture of one.
Compose the brief
Who you are hunting
Genre
Territory
Monthly listener ceiling
20,000A preference, not a filter, and there is no exception. Past the ceiling the ranking penalty climbs to 0.35 at double it and stops there: the shaded band. A hard filter would be the full 1.00, the top of the box, and nothing you set here reaches it. Everyone over your ceiling still comes back, lower.
What you want to see
The evidence the judge ranks on. Someone who cannot show these loses to someone who can.
What counts against them
The scout is sent out told to avoid these, and the judge sees them on every candidate. A strong steer, not a gate.
Candidates filed per run
40The directive
Find emerging folk or singer-songwriter artists working out of the United States or the United Kingdom. Push anyone past 20,000 monthly listeners down the slate — never off it. Rank hardest on a short-form clip that travelled. Mark down anyone carrying a major label deal. File the 40 strongest every run.
What the scout is issued
The object itself, not an illustration of one. Read it before the scout is hired, change it after, and every run is held to it.
Or write the paragraph instead and let ATHENA draft the object from it. Either way you read the parameters before anyone is hired, and you can change them after — including on a scout that has already been out three months.
The return
Names you were not going to find.
The bar a scout is held to is candidates who fit the brief and would not have turned up by googling the genre and the word “rising”. Every one arrives with its source, the claim, the excerpt and the date it was seen.
Where the signal clustered
pop
20soul
18female vocalist
14indie pop
13rnb
11singer-songwriter
10jazz
8neo-soul
8The ranked slate
Corin Ashby
SC-0172 · United States · rnb
Mira Solvang
SC-0171 · soul
Teddy Roan
SC-0171 · soul
Nell Ferris
SC-0172 · rnb
Ozzy Kestrel
SC-0171 · United States · pop
Lux Bramwell
SC-0171 · soul
Delta Wray
SC-0172 · indie pop
Halcyon Pike
SC-0171 · jazz
Rue Castellane
SC-0171 · Australia · rnb
Standing orders
Hire it once. It keeps working.
A scout is an operative with a record, not a search you re-run.
It gets better at your taste, not at taste
A lane only counts as productive if you actually did something with what it returned — so a route that reliably yields twenty rejects stops being replayed. The scout you have run for three months is not the scout you hired.
It finds the lane you are not covering
ATHENA reads your board, spots the gap, and drafts the scout to fill it before you have noticed it is there. Proposing costs nothing; you decide whether it ever runs.
Pass on someone and the reason files against a fixed list rather than a text box, so a year of rejections is something you can actually read back. Two years on, you can still say what you saw in March.
Write one brief.
Describe the artist you have been looking for and send a scout after them. The first $5 is on us — no card.