Terms & conditions

You need to be old enough to agree to this on your own account. That means 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, 18 in India, where the Digital Personal Data Protection Act requires a parent or guardian to consent for anyone younger, and 13 elsewhere. If you are under the age that applies to you, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms and open the account.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your password to yourself and tell us at support@stereobox.io if you think someone else has it.

Listening is free and supported by advertising. Free or paid, streaming is a personal, non-transferable permission to play music through Stereobox — it is not a sale, and it ends when your account does.

Stereobox sells three different things, and they are not the same. What you bought is recorded against your account and shown on the track.

Ownership does not cancel licences already sold

This matters to both sides, so it is worth stating plainly. When you buy ownership of a track, every commercial licence sold before that moment remains valid. Those people paid for a permission that had no end date, and we do not take it back from them. What ownership buys you is that no further licence will ever be sold. Before you buy, the track shows how many licences already exist.

You keep your copyright. Uploading to Stereobox does not transfer it to us. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, stream, promote and — at the prices you set — sell your track through Stereobox. That licence exists so we can run the service, and it ends when you remove the track, except where we must keep serving people who already bought it.

By uploading, you confirm that:

• the music is yours, or you have written permission covering everything in it — including samples, session players and any vocal you did not sing;
• you have the right to sell it on the terms you chose, including ownership if you offered it;
• it does not infringe anyone's rights, and is not something you are contractually barred from releasing.

If that turns out not to be true, we can remove the track, refund the people who bought it, and recover those refunds from your earnings. Repeatedly uploading music you do not own ends the account.

Selling ownership is final

When someone buys ownership, the transfer is real: you no longer own that recording and cannot sell, license or release it again. Set an ownership price only if you mean it. We will always ask you to confirm before the first ownership sale on a track.

Prices are in US dollars and shown before you confirm. Who takes the money depends on where you are:

• Android — Google Play Billing.
• iPhone and iPad — the Apple App Store.
• The website — Stripe.

We never see or store your card details. Subscriptions renew automatically each month until cancelled, and you cancel through whichever store you subscribed with — the pricing page has the steps. Cancelling stops the next charge; you keep ad-free listening until the period you already paid for runs out.

Refunds are on their own page, because who you ask depends on where you bought.

• Upload music, artwork or video you do not have the rights to.
• Redistribute, resell or re-upload anything you downloaded from Stereobox, or use a download commercially.
• Inflate play counts or chart positions — by script, by bot, or by paying people. Plays we believe to be artificial are removed, and earnings from them reversed.
• Scrape the catalogue, or use it to train a model, without written permission.
• Harass anyone, or post anything unlawful, in messages, comments or profiles.
• Work around any technical limit, or attack the service.

Every track and profile has a report control, and the reports reach a person. If you hold copyright in something published on Stereobox without your permission, write to support@stereobox.io with the track, proof of your rights and your contact details. We remove first and ask questions after, and we tell whoever uploaded it so they can respond. Accounts that attract repeated valid complaints are closed.

We work to keep Stereobox running but cannot promise it never stops. Features change, and occasionally a track disappears because the person who uploaded it removed it or never had the right to it. If that happens to something you bought, you get your money back — see refunds.

Nothing here limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, or — under German law — intent and gross negligence, and claims under the Product Liability Act. Your statutory rights as a consumer always apply in full, whatever else this page says.

Beyond that, we are liable for breaking a duty that goes to the heart of this agreement, and only for the loss that could reasonably have been expected. We are not liable for lost profits, lost data you did not back up, or anything we could not reasonably have foreseen.

You can delete yours at any time — here is how, and what survives it. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and will say why unless telling you would be unlawful. If we close your account without cause, we refund the unused part of any subscription.

When these terms change materially we tell you in the app and by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and you can close your account before then if you disagree. Minor corrections take effect when published, and the date at the top always shows the current version.

For the iOS app: this agreement is between you and Shader Bytes, not Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content, and has no obligation to support it. Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these terms and may enforce them against you. If the app fails to conform to any warranty, you may tell Apple, who will refund the purchase price; beyond that, Apple has no other warranty obligation. You confirm you are not in a country subject to a US Government embargo, and are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

Shader Bytes is an Indian company serving users worldwide, so which law governs depends on where you are:

• Consumers in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland — the consumer protection law of the country you live in, and you may always bring a claim in your own courts. Nothing here deprives you of a right your national law gives you, and European law applies to you regardless of where we are registered.
• Everyone else — the laws of India, and the courts of city to be confirmed.

We are not obliged to take part in dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board, and do not currently do so. If part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

support@stereobox.io, or the postal address on the legal notice.