Plain English Terms of Use
Basic Policies and Interesting Tidbits
Ads
We don't have ads on our site, and we never will. We sell music to you and for you, not your eyeballs to someone else. That's a big problem for a lot of the "Web 2.0" world, and we want no part of it.
Spam
We have no reason to spam you, because we're not amassing a database of personal information for sale to advertisers or any other third party. Any "data mining" or "social graph" work that we do will be solely to ensure that you know about events and music you might like! You can even opt out of that if you like. A corollary to that is the fact that you can delete your entire profile easily with no fuss. We don't save your data, because we're not selling it to anyone.
Privacy
We do not want to share your information with anyone. We feel privacy rights are sacrosanct on the web, and we'll fight to the bitter end to preserve yours. See the above.
Artist Royalties
We pay 80 percent of the song price to the artist (we want to increase that number over time). Song prices are $1 each. All royalties due are clearly reported on artists' private statistics pages. We pay quarterly, at the end of the quarter. By default we will mail a check to the address you specify on your registration form. Arrangements can be made for electronic payment via Paypal.
Pricing
Songs are $1 each. Albums are $10 each, no matter how many songs are on them.
Audio-files
We started this business partially out of a desire to have better audio quality in the songs we buy online. We want to use Metalabel as much as we want you to! If you're an artist, you'll notice that we have higher quality standards than anywhere else on the web. If you buy music on Metalabel, you'll notice the same thing. We want to replace the CD business, so we need CD-quality files. We also offer a couple of different formats (256K AAC, Apple Lossless Audio, FLAC, and 320K MP3s) to suit your tastes and predilections. All our audio files contain the cover art (if provided) and the full discographical metadata information. We care about such things, and we assume that you do too, if you love music.
File Types
mp4a
mp4a is our file extension for AAC files. AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding. Many people think that AAC is Apple's proprietary format, but it is not. It is an international standard, like mp3, though it is not as widely supported as the mp3 format. Like mp3, it is a lossy format, meaning that audio information is lost when encoding to it.
flac
flac is our extension for FLAC files. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It is not very widely supported—we support it for those who are adamant about retaining open-source lossless audio files, and who know how to transcode and play them.
alac
m4a is our extension for ALAC files. ALAC stands for Apple Lossless Audio Codec. ALAC is a proprietary format, but not strongly. There are several open-source applications for it, and it works on iPods and in iTunes.
mp3
You know it and love it. Though flawed, mp3 is the most popular audio format.
Samples
The samples in the Metalabel Player are at a much lower bitrate than the songs purchased. The samples are 128K MP3s.
DRM
Come on, now. We don't use it, and we want nothing to do with it.
Technology
We know people love hearing about and using the latest greatest technology. We do too. We did some cool things to build the site, but nothing outrageously bleeding edge. We're "Web 2.0," but you can barely tell. And we like it that way. We try not to throw it in your face with enormous fonts, cartoon characters, and candy colors. We use Ajax around the site, but not so you'd notice: we keep it real useful and unobtrusive; it's definitely not an end in itself. The site was built using Mason/mod_perl. We use Amazon S3 to serve our files. We decided very early on to become OpenID consumers as well, to make it easier for people to participate across the Internet. If you look in Statscan, you'll see some nice sparklines: We use the Google Charts API to do all of our statistical reporting. Artists and scouts will see what we're talking about in their statistics pages. We use the Google Maps API to geocode events. I don't think we've used a single commercial software resource to build the site, and that's just fine by us!
OpenID
OpenID 1.1 vs. 2.0
OpenID is a fantastic technology. As of May 16, 2008, we are OpenId 2.0 enabled.
Metalabels
You can read about the big idea, or you can read how to make one in the FAQ.
Social Networks
You can install the Metalabel Music Player application on several other social networks. If you are an artist, you can enter your Metalabel bandname when installing the player, in order to have your music appear in the playlist. It's a great way to share your music, generate interest, increase traffic, and of course make sales. Regular users can enter the Metalabel bandname of their favorite Metalabel artist, or leave the form blank to stream and play songs from all Metalabel artists. Support independent music while pimping your social networking profile!