Scene Handbook
Docs
Scene borrows serious market language, but the point is not to sound financial for its own sake. The point is to make artist positioning legible. These sections explain what the terms mean inside this app, how they relate to each other, and what you should actually infer from them.
How To Read The Product
Direction
Long or short answers the question: which way do you think the artist moves from here?
Sizing
Conviction, exposure, and capacity answer the question: how much of your portfolio do you want behind that opinion?
Crowding
Open interest and funding answer the question: how expensive is it to be on your side of the market right now?
Relationships
Network maps the people and pages around an artist
Network is the relationship layer on top of the chart. It is where Scene starts to explain who carries an artist, who shapes the sound, and who they keep showing up beside.
Not every useful artist signal is a line on a chart. Some of the highest-signal clues are relationship clues: which SoundCloud pages keep hosting the artist, which producers recur, and which names keep showing up in the same orbit.
That is what the network surface is for. It is not a popularity leaderboard and it is not a generic social graph. It is a focused research view of repeated connections that may help explain why an artist is moving, or why they might move next.
This is especially useful in underground contexts where distribution quality, host support, and recurring collaborators can matter before top-line metrics fully catch up.
Quick Read
- Hosts show the pages carrying songs, snippets, or exclusives outside the main profile.
- Producers show who repeatedly shapes the sound.
- Features show who the artist keeps appearing beside.
- Network is evidence, not a valuation score.
How to read it
A repeat host can matter more than a random repost.
A producer-host node can be stronger than a pure host because it signals both creation and distribution.
The point is not to prove certainty. The point is to surface structure that a flat metric misses.
Crowding
Funding is the crowding cost of holding a trade
Funding is not a reward for being active. It is the mechanism that makes crowded consensus trades cost something to hold.
Scene uses funding to make one-sided positioning feel different from balanced positioning. If everyone crowds into the same side of an artist, that side should not feel free to hold forever.
Funding currently settles weekly. If an artist is crowded long, longs pay shorts. If an artist is crowded short, shorts pay longs. If positioning is balanced or too thin, funding stays at zero.
That means a trade can be directionally correct and still be expensive to hold. This is the point. Funding adds a second question on top of “am I right?” which is “am I paying too much to stay with the crowd?”
Quick Read
- Crowded long means longs pay shorts.
- Crowded short means shorts pay longs.
- Thin or balanced books produce little or no funding.
- Projected funding is an estimate. The real transfer lands when the weekly settlement runs.
How it feels in the app
Artist pages show projected weekly funding before you open the trade.
Portfolio and credits surfaces show what actually settled.
If your side is overcrowded, you are paying to stay in that trade.
Direction
Long and short are the directional side of your call
A long says the artist is likely to gain traction. A short says the artist is likely to lose traction.
Long and short are the cleanest opinion you can express on Scene. You are not just bookmarking artists you like. You are taking a side on whether the data will strengthen or weaken from here.
Scene tracks those positions against listener movement, then layers market-style mechanics like funding and crowding on top. So the direction of the trade and the shape of the market both matter.
A strong long in an empty book is different from the same long in a crowded one. The first is just a thesis. The second is a thesis plus crowding risk.
Quick Read
- Long if you want upside from growth.
- Short if you want upside from decline.
- Direction answers “which way do I think this moves?”
- Funding answers “is everyone else already on this side?”
What this is not
A short is not “I dislike this artist.” It is a position on the direction of the data.
A long is not automatically safer. Safety depends on crowding, sizing, and what the artist actually does next.
Sizing
Conviction is how hard you press the trade
Conviction is your sizing choice. It tells Scene whether this is a normal trade, a bigger trade, or your biggest trade.
On Scene, conviction is the user-facing sizing control. Instead of asking you for notional amounts, the app asks how much of your portfolio you want behind the idea.
Higher conviction means the position matters more. If the call works, the result is larger. If the call goes against you, the damage is larger too. That is why conviction should feel like a deliberate choice, not a cosmetic label.
Conviction also determines how much capacity a position consumes and how much exposure the trade gets under the hood. So it affects both how many trades you can carry and how forcefully each trade moves your book.
Quick Read
- Standard is your baseline size.
- Higher conviction consumes more capacity.
- Higher conviction increases exposure.
- Higher conviction also scales funding with the trade.
Practical read
Use standard when you like the setup but do not need to press it.
Use higher conviction when you want the position to matter more than a normal line item.
Very High Conviction is for the trade you are willing to make part of your identity for the week.
Force
Exposure is the multiplier underneath your conviction choice
Exposure is how much force your position carries once it is open.
If conviction is the size selector you click, exposure is the multiplier Scene actually uses when it calculates the effect of that position. Higher exposure means bigger wins, bigger losses, and bigger funding transfers.
This matters because not all open positions are equal. A 2.2x position should not behave like a 1.0x position just because both count as one open trade. Exposure is what preserves that difference.
The conviction modal shows exposure directly so you can see the tradeoff. More exposure gives you more upside if the call works, but it also makes crowding costs and downside hits land harder.
Quick Read
- Standard (STD) uses 1 capacity and 1.0x exposure.
- High Conviction (HC) uses 2 capacity and 1.7x exposure.
- Very High Conviction (VHC) uses 3 capacity and 2.2x exposure.
Why exposure deserves its own concept
Capacity tells you how much room the trade takes up.
Exposure tells you how strong the trade actually is once it is open.
Those are related, but they are not the same thing.
Limits
Capacity is the room your portfolio has for open risk
Capacity is not a score. It is the budget that keeps your portfolio from turning every position into a max-size bet.
Capacity is how Scene limits how much open risk you can carry at once. Every open position consumes some of it. Bigger conviction tiers consume more.
This is separate from exposure. Capacity is about how many and how large your live positions can be. Exposure is about how strong each one is once it exists.
If you run out of capacity, you have to close something, reduce your sizing habits, or expand room. That constraint is useful because it forces tradeoffs instead of letting the portfolio become a pile of unchecked opinions.
Quick Read
- Each open trade uses capacity.
- Higher-conviction positions use more capacity than standard ones.
- Running out of capacity is the app telling you to choose what matters most.
A good mental model
Think of capacity as shelf space.
Think of conviction as how much room you give one artist on the shelf.
Think of exposure as how heavy that artist is once you put them there.
Positioning
Open interest tells you how much live positioning exists on an artist
Open interest is the count of active positions. It is a positioning signal, not a popularity score.
Open interest tells you how many live trades exist on an artist right now. The long / short split tells you where that positioning sits.
This matters because funding is derived from crowding. If open interest is heavy and one side dominates, the market has shape. If open interest is light, funding should usually stay quiet.
Open interest also gives you a social read. An artist can have muted listener movement and still have a busy book if people expect a turn, a release, or a collapse.
Quick Read
- High open interest means a lot of live attention.
- Long / short imbalance is what creates crowding.
- Open interest is trader positioning, not audience size.
What to look for
Low OI usually means less crowding and less funding pressure.
High OI plus strong imbalance usually means the market is leaning hard.
That is where funding language starts to matter.
Balance
Credits are where rewards and funding actually settle
If you want the account-level record of what happened, credits is where it shows up.
Credits are the in-app balance used for rewards, store actions, and funding transfers. When weekly funding settles, the payout or charge lands here directly.
That is why the credits page is not just a rewards page anymore. It is also part of the ledger for how your portfolio behaved in a crowded market.
Scene currently enforces a funding floor of -1000. If a debit would push you below that, the charge is clipped instead of letting the balance run away forever.
Quick Read
- Rewards push your balance up.
- Funding can push your balance up or down.
- The credits page is the cleanest place to verify what actually settled.
Why this matters
Projected funding is useful for decision-making.
Credits history is useful for verification.
Those are different surfaces because one is expectation and the other is settlement.