Guess the Artist

Green is an exact match. Yellow is close, and close has a fixed meaning for each column. On Country it means the same continent. On Genre it means a neighbouring genre, so a rock guess is yellow against a metal answer. On Debut it means a first album within two years. On Members it means one member more or fewer. On Vocals it means one of the two acts has men and women sharing lead. Grey means none of that applies.

Toward the answer. An up arrow on Debut means the answer released its first album later than your guess did, and a down arrow means earlier. On Members an up arrow means the answer has more members. The arrow stays on a yellow cell too, so a yellow 1985 with an up arrow means 1986 or 1987.

228 acts that most listeners could name without being a fan of the genre, picked by how many fans they have on streaming and how many people read about them on Wikipedia. 70 released their first album before 1980, 77 between 1980 and 1999, and 81 in 2000 or later. Solo careers count as separate acts from the bands they came from, so Beyoncé and Destiny's Child are both in, and so are Paul McCartney and The Beatles.

The year of the first studio album released under that name or by that person. Mixtapes, EPs, live albums and compilations do not count, which puts Drake at 2010 and not at his first mixtape in 2006. Some dates surprise people: Katy Perry's first album came out in 2001, a gospel record under the name Katy Hudson, seven years before her first pop hit.

A solo act is one, and the number for a band is the line-up on the records it is best known for, not its current line-up. Queen is four and Iron Maiden is five, even though Iron Maiden has played as a six-piece since 1999. Gorillaz counts as its four cartoon members.

Pop borders rock, R&B, electronic, Latin, K-pop and country. Rock borders metal, punk and folk, and folk borders country. Hip-hop borders R&B and reggae, and R&B borders jazz. A genre label is an opinion, and many acts fit more than one, so each act has the one a casual listener would give. The neighbours are there so a near miss reads as yellow rather than as a dead end.

The act is a producer or an electronic duo whose best known records are sung by other people. Avicii, David Guetta and Daft Punk are in this group. Guests has no yellow, because a hired singer tells you nothing about who sings for anyone else.

The place it started, which is not always where the members were born or live now. Bee Gees count as Australian, because the brothers started out in Queensland, and Fleetwood Mac count as British, because the band formed in London. The United Kingdom is one country here, so Scottish and Welsh acts share a flag with English ones. Puerto Rico has its own entry, with the code PR in place of a flag.

No. The search box only offers acts from the pool, because every guess has to be comparable on all five columns. A name it cannot find is a name the answer cannot be, so you never waste a guess. Accents and punctuation are optional when you type: beyonce finds Beyoncé and acdc finds AC/DC.

It narrows who the answer can be, not who you can guess. The eras follow the debut year, so an act that peaked in the 2000s after a first album in 1996 counts as MTV. A guess from another era still tells you about country, genre and vocals.