How It Works

Getting your record pressed takes about thirty seconds and five artists. Here’s what actually happens between the moment you hit submit and the moment your sleeve shows up.

1. You name your five

Start typing an artist and we’ll suggest matches pulled live from iTunes’ search catalog, so misspellings mostly sort themselves out. Add five names: your headliner, your deep cut, your guilty pleasure, whatever’s actually in your rotation. Order doesn’t matter; what matters is that it’s honest.

2. A quick, invisible bot check

Before your list goes anywhere, Cloudflare Turnstile runs a background verification to confirm a human is submitting the form. On most devices this resolves silently while you’re still typing your fifth artist, so it shouldn’t slow you down or interrupt anything.

3. The scouting report

Your five artists get sent to an AI model instructed to think like a scout, not a search engine. The actual reasoning it uses to land on a team, genre, era, energy, and cultural lane weighed together rather than artist by artist, is explained in more depth on our About page, so we won’t re-cover it here. What’s specific to this step: every request forces at least two different decades into the pool of candidates it considers, and actively discourages two historically overused answers picked at random from a rotating list (the 2001-02 Kings and the 2018-19 Raptors show up on that list often, for what it’s worth) so that similar taste profiles don’t all collapse onto the same three or four teams. That’s the actual mechanism behind why two friends with overlapping music taste tend to get pressed onto different eras instead of the same answer twice.

4. Building the depth chart

Once a team-season is locked in, each of your five artists is mapped to a specific player who was genuinely on that roster that year: your biggest name becomes the franchise player, your deepest cut becomes the cult role player, and so on. The system also writes a short scouting blurb, tags your taste with a few genre stickers, and assigns an overall rating, all styled to look like liner notes on the back of a record sleeve.

5. Press, share, run it back

Your finished sleeve can be copied as text, downloaded or shared as an image straight to your phone’s share sheet, or posted to a permanent link so friends can see it without generating their own. Didn’t love the result, or just curious what a different five artists would do? Hit “run it back” and press another record.