The deal, in plain English

notch.fm is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Apple or Spotify. Neither of them has reviewed it, runs it or is responsible for it. The names Apple Music and Spotify, and their marks, belong to their owners; they are used here only to say what this app connects to.

What notch.fm is: a place to score, tag and organise music. What it is not: a music service. It has no catalogue of its own, no player and no audio. Connect Apple Music or Spotify and you are listening through your own account there; connect neither and you can still rate, tag, search and organise, with no listening attached.

Your account, not ours

Connecting a service goes through that service’s own authorisation screen, with the account you already have. notch.fm never asks for or sees your password at Apple or Spotify, and it cannot create, share or lend you an account at either.

The service does the playing

Pressing play in notch.fm sends a command to the Apple Music or Spotify app already signed in on one of your devices. That service plays the audio, counts the stream and pays the rights holders. Each has its own requirement for it - Spotify requires Premium, Apple Music requires a current subscription - so where the transport controls do not work it is their rule, not a paywall of ours.

Their terms still apply

Your use of a service’s music is governed by that service, not by this page: Spotify’s terms and privacy policy, or Apple Media Services terms. Nothing here grants you any right to their music, and nothing here can take one away.

You hold the switch

Revoke notch.fm’s access at any time and it stops immediately: Spotify at spotify.com/account/apps, Apple Music in your Apple Account settings. Either can also change or withdraw what third-party apps are permitted to do, without warning either of us, and where that removes a capability the app is meant to say so rather than fake it.

The privacy page lists every piece of data the app reads from a connected service and the feature each one exists for, along with the flat commitments: no audio is downloaded or stored, no model is trained on your data, two services are never combined in one view, and your service tokens never reach the browser or any third party.

• The scores and tags you set are your work. notch.fm stores them so it can answer questions with them; it does not claim ownership of them.
• You can export the lot as JSON at any moment, on any plan, for free. Downgrading from Premium does not delete anything.
• You can delete your account and take everything with it. It is permanent - the privacy page describes exactly what goes and the two things that deliberately stay.
• Songs you liked and playlists you built through a connected service live in your account there. Deleting your notch.fm account leaves them exactly where they are. Anything you built with no service connected lives here, and comes out in the same export.

Premium is a subscription to notch.fm’s own features, and only those. It lifts the limits this app imposes on its own product: how many songs you can rate and tag, how many playlists you can keep, whether you can publish them, whether you can post comments, the badge and level track, and how much smart search you get.

It is not a way to buy music, or access to any of it. It includes no music, unlocks nothing on Apple Music’s or Spotify’s side, is not a subscription to either and is no substitute for one. Whatever your account at a music service lets you do is exactly the same before and after you pay us, and paying us while subscribing to nothing gets you every notch.fm feature and no listening.

The pricing section on the home page lists what each plan allows, and Settings → Subscription shows what your account is on right now. The exact numbers are not restated here on purpose: the limits the app actually enforces live in one place in the code, and a third copy of them is a third thing to go stale.

Upgrade, downgrade or cancel from Settings whenever you like. Payment is handled by Stripe; card details are never sent to notch.fm and are never stored by it.

Comments, public playlists, profiles and the feed are seen by other people, so the usual applies: no harassment, no hate, no spam, nothing illegal, and do not post other people’s private information.

• Comment text is filtered before it is stored - the app keeps the filtered version and never the raw input.
• Content that breaks the rules can be removed, and an account that keeps breaking them can be suspended.
• Impersonating someone else, or presenting yourself as connected to notch.fm, Apple or Spotify when you are not, is not on.
• Do not use notch.fm to redistribute a service’s content, or to try to extract, scrape or resell it. There is nothing in the app that does that, and building something on top of it that does is not on either.

This is a project under active development, run by one person. It is offered as it is:

• There is no uptime guarantee and no support commitment. It can be down, and it can be down while you want it.
• Features can change, move or be withdrawn - the changelog records what has already happened rather than what will.
• Parts of it depend on other people’s APIs - Apple’s, Spotify’s - which change on their schedule rather than ours. Where that removes a capability, the app is meant to say so rather than fake it.
• It is not a backup service. Nothing here should be the only copy of anything you care about, which is exactly why the export button exists and is free.

There is no company behind notch.fm to name: it is an individual project, not a registered entity, and this page does not pretend otherwise by inventing one.

These are not ours. Apple and Spotify each require an app built on their service to put certain terms in front of the people using it, and these are those, in plain words. They are here because they are required, and marking them as somebody else’s is more useful than blending them into the rest.

• They are a third-party beneficiary of this page. Where these terms cover your use of a service’s content, that service may enforce them directly against you. In plain terms: this is an agreement about their music as well as about our app, and they are entitled to hold you to it.
• Their content comes as it is. Apple and Spotify give no warranty about the music, the metadata or the artwork reaching you through this app, and neither of them is responsible for notch.fm, for anything it does, or for anything that goes wrong with it.
• Their own terms govern their content. Using a service through notch.fm is still using that service, and their agreement with you applies to it in full. Nothing on this page replaces, relaxes or adds to it.
• No extracting, copying or reselling. You may not use notch.fm to download, copy, redistribute or resell a service’s content, or to build something that does. There is nothing in the app that could, and doing it another way is still not on.

notch.fm hosts no music. What it does host is things people write: comments, playlist names and descriptions, tag names, profile text. If something somebody wrote here infringes your copyright, it can be taken down.

Reporting it

Send a notice through the contact page. Identify the work, point at the exact thing here you say infringes it, give an address we can reply to, and say that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised and that what you have told us is accurate.

What happens then

It is read by a person, and content that infringes is removed. You get an answer either way, including when the answer is that we do not think it does.

Repeat infringers

An account that repeatedly posts infringing content is suspended, and then closed. That is a policy rather than a threat: the point of writing it down is that it applies the same way each time rather than depending on who is looking.

If you think it was wrong

Say so through the same page. Something removed by mistake goes back, and telling us is the fastest way to get that looked at.

There is deliberately no postal address or named agent here yet. This is run by one person and not a registered company, so publishing a formal designated agent would be claiming a structure that does not exist. The contact route above is read, which is the part that matters. This paragraph changes when the entity does.

notch.fm is run by Sean Brill, a sole proprietor based in New Jersey, United States. There is no company behind it - one person builds and operates it, and that person is who this agreement is with.

Reach us at support@notch.fm. That address reaches a person, and it is the right one for anything on this page or the privacy policy.

notch.fm is not for children. You have to be 16 or older to make an account, and by making one you are confirming that you are.

If we find out an account belongs to somebody younger, we will close it and delete what it holds. If you are a parent and think that applies to your child, email support@notch.fm and we will handle it without argument.

• You, at any time. Delete your account in Settings. Everything it holds goes with it, and the privacy policy says exactly what that means and how long it takes. Export your ratings first if you want them - the export is free and is not behind the paywall.
• Us, if you break the rules above. Harassment, impersonation and trying to break the service are the cases. We will tell you why.
• Us, if notch.fm shuts down. You get reasonable notice and a chance to export, and any Premium time you have paid for and not used is refunded.

This agreement is governed by the law of the State of New Jersey, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If something cannot be resolved by emailing us, the courts of New Jersey are where it goes.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here. Both are common and both mostly benefit the side that wrote them, and a one-person app does not need to take your day in court away from you to operate.

It will, because the app does. The date at the top moves when the content of the page changes, not when the site is redeployed - so a date that has not moved genuinely means nothing has.