Privacy policy

Last updated 15 October 2026. Ala Africa Limited, 1st Floor, North Westgate House, Harlow, Essex, CM20 1YS.

Draft: this page is waiting for review by a solicitor and may change before launch.

Earmark helps artists get heard by playlist curators, test songs with listeners, and pays listeners and curators for honest verdicts. This policy explains what we collect to do that. Ala Africa Limited is the data controller. Questions or requests: support@earmarksongs.com.

What we collect

Account: your email address, the country we detect when you sign up (from your connection, to set your currency), your currency, and a display name and city if you add them.
Music you upload or link: audio files, titles, artist names, notes, links, and what we work out from the audio (tempo, key, loudness, a spectrogram). Full tracks stay private; listeners and curators hear a short clip or preview.
What you do on Earmark: pitches, curator reviews and scores, test answers (including the city and country you give), chart ratings, and how long you listened to a clip, so we can pay only for real listens.
Curators: playlist links; the public details of each playlist we read every day to verify it (title, description, the owner account's public id, follower and track counts); and the reviews you write.
Payments: what you bought or earned and when. Card and bank details go straight to Stripe or Paystack; we never see or store card numbers.
Messages you send us through the contact form or by email.
Security: your IP address, held for up to 24 hours, to stop abuse such as sign-in floods. Error reports, which may include the page you were on.

Why, and our lawful basis

To run your account, campaigns, tests and payouts: contract.
To prevent fraud, fake listens, bots and abuse, and keep Earmark secure: legitimate interests.
To keep payment and tax records: legal obligation.
To understand where people drop off so we can improve the product: legitimate interests. We count anonymous page views and steps. We use no advertising or tracking cookies and no third-party analytics.

We use AI to listen to uploaded music and draft descriptions and pitches. We do not use your music or data to train AI models, and our AI provider does not either under our agreement with them. Nothing about you is decided automatically in a way that has legal or similarly significant effects. Golden Ear ranks come from how your calls score against real outcomes, and you can ask us to review one.

Who processes data for us

Stripe and Paystack: payments and payouts.
Anthropic: AI analysis of audio features and your notes, to write pitches.
Resend: sending emails.
Our cloud hosting, database and file storage providers: running the service and storing audio.
Sentry: error reports.

When you paste a released song link, we look up its title on Deezer or Apple Music to find the official 30-second preview. To verify curators we read their public playlists on the platform they use (for example the Spotify, Deezer or YouTube APIs). Those lookups carry the song or playlist, not you. Some processors are in the United States. Transfers are covered by the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

Curators see the song, the artist name you give, your pitch and the preview. Artists see test results as anonymous totals, plus comments labelled with a listener's rank and city, never their name or email. Songs you enter on The Rise, or released songs you rank on the Golden Ear chart, are public.

How long we keep it

Account and activity data: until you delete your account.
Audio files: until you delete your account. We delete them when you do.
Payment records: 6 years, as UK law requires, linked only to an anonymised id after deletion.
Anonymous answers inside artists' test reports: kept in the report, with nothing linking them to you.
Contact messages: 2 years. Security IP records: up to 24 hours. Error reports: 90 days.
A record each time our staff look at your account for support, with the reason: 2 years.
Bounce and unsubscribe records for your email address: kept so we don't email you again.

Cookies

One essential cookie keeps you signed in (em_session, 30 days). It ends after 14 days unused. No other cookies, so there is no cookie banner. If a form comes back with an error, what you typed is kept in that browser tab only, so you don't lose it, and cleared once the form goes through.

Your rights

You can see and download your data (Account → Download my data), correct it, delete your account yourself (Account → Delete my account), object to how we use it, or ask us to restrict it. Email support@earmarksongs.com and we'll reply within one month. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Age

Earmark is for people aged 18 and over, because it involves payments and payouts.