Lots of good stuff from NWA, Jadakiss, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Big Pun, Eminem, Nas, and more.
Tournaments are a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff in any high-dimensional space like music, and it's really fun to have no idea which track's actually gonna take the top spot until it's all over.
As a mostly-backend/data developer for the past decade, it was my first real foray into pixel-perfect frontend and was completed last year before the AIs conquered the territory. Flexbox is fairly intuitive and frontend is quite satisfying!
Structure was a series of 4-track group rounds (top 2 advance) followed by a 128-track head-to-head bracket.
Knockout round: 564 -> 512 tracks
Squad Round 1: 512 -> 256 tracks
Squad Round 2: 256 -> 128 tracks
Bracket Round: 128 tracks -> 1 winner
Clicking on any track tees up a preview in the embedded Spotify mini-player.