Editorial policy

Ground Frequency is operated by P.O.MFS, the company behind MiSFY. We disclose that everywhere, and we keep the wall simple: coverage is never for sale, and listing status never shapes coverage. No artist, venue, label or promoter can pay to appear in a chart or a story, and being on or off MiSFY changes nothing about how we report.

We publish what our own data can support. Pieces lead with numbers from our tracking; when we use outside sources, we name them and link them. We do not republish other outlets' reporting as our own.

Pieces carry a desk byline — “Ground Frequency Data Desk — Western Europe,” and so on. A desk is an organisational unit responsible for a defined beat, the way a bureau is. It is not a person, and it is not written to read like one.

We do not create author personas. There are no invented local correspondents, no synthetic names, no generated portraits, no fabricated bios claiming someone lives in a city they have never been to. Every piece filed under a desk is edited and signed off by a named human editor, and that name is the one that answers for it.

This is a deliberate limit, and it costs us something: a local voice reads better than a bureau line. We take that cost because our only real asset is that the numbers can be trusted. A reader who catches one invented byline is right to doubt every figure underneath it.

Desks are built to hold real people. When a genuine local correspondent joins a beat, their real name appears on it — which is precisely why we did not fill those seats with inventions first.

Data extraction and first drafts are AI-assisted. Publication is a human decision: every piece is edited and approved by a named editor, and every number is checked against the locked extract it came from. We do not publish fabricated quotes, invented sources, or synthetic bylines.

When we get something wrong we fix it, mark it, and log it on the corrections page. Material corrections are noted on the piece itself.

We report on public creative activity: released music, announced shows, public growth signals. We do not publish private information, and artist-level scores appear as published chart positions — not as raw follower counts.