Your content
You own everything you upload. We do not take any ownership of your music, artwork, lyrics or metadata, and we never will.
We take one narrow licence, and only so the software can work: permission to store your files, make the small streaming copies the player needs, and show your content to the people you share it with. Nothing else.
If you leave, you take everything with you. We do not keep a copy, and we never claim a right to keep using your music afterwards.
You own your content
Everything you upload stays yours. That includes your recordings, your masters, your artwork, your lyrics, your credits and your metadata. Uploading a file to Northwest Falls transfers no ownership, no copyright and no interest of any kind.
We do not claim any right to release your music, license it to anyone, use it in marketing, train anything on it, or make it available to a third party. If we ever wanted to feature something you made, we would ask you first and you could say no.
The licence we need
To run the service at all we need your permission to do a small number of specific things with the files you give us. This is the whole list:
- Store your files. Hold your uploads on our storage provider so they still exist tomorrow.
- Make streaming copies. Generate the small compressed versions the player uses, plus the waveform data. Your original file is never altered.
- Show your content to people you choose. Serve your files to you, to collaborators you invite, to labels you have granted access to, and to anyone opening a link you created.
- Make backups. Keep redundant copies so a hardware failure does not lose your work.
This licence is non-exclusive, worldwide only because the internet is, and lasts only as long as you keep the content on Northwest Falls. It exists so the buttons in the product do something. It gives us no commercial rights.
It ends when you do. Delete a track and the licence over that track ends. Close your account and the licence ends entirely. The only exception is backup copies still working their way out of our systems, which are deleted on the schedule below.
Your masters are never modified
The file you upload is stored exactly as you sent it, byte for byte. We do not re-encode it, normalise it, apply loudness correction, or strip your embedded metadata. When you download it again you get the identical file.
Streaming uses a separate compressed copy we create alongside the original. That copy exists so a browser can play the track without downloading several hundred megabytes. It is derived from your file. It never replaces it.
Labels and access
A label can pay for your account. A label can be given access to some or all of your catalogue. Neither of those things gives the label any ownership of your work.
Access on Northwest Falls is a permission you grant. You choose how much a label can see, and you can withdraw that access at any time, on your own, without the label agreeing to it. Withdrawing access removes their visibility and deletes nothing of yours.
If a label stops paying for your seat, your account moves to the free plan. You keep every file you uploaded. Anything above the free storage limit becomes read-only, meaning you can still play it and still download it, but you cannot add more until you free up space or choose a plan.
Any separate agreement you sign with a label is between you and them. It has no effect on this document, and we are not a party to it.
Getting your content out
You can export at any time from Settings, without asking us and without a support ticket. The export gives you every master exactly as you uploaded it, along with your metadata in a readable file.
We do not throttle exports, gate them behind a plan, or make them slower than uploads. A service that holds your career should be easy to leave.
Deletion
Deleting a track removes it from your library immediately and queues the underlying files for permanent deletion, which completes within 30 days.
Closing your account schedules everything for deletion after 30 days. During those 30 days signing in cancels the closure and nothing is lost. After that window the data is permanently removed and we cannot recover it for you, including from backups.
We keep no shadow copy of deleted content, and we do not retain deleted files for any internal purpose.
When we would look at your files
We do not browse user content. There is no internal tool for staff to listen through accounts, and no recommendation system reading your catalogue.
There are three situations where a person at Northwest Falls may access a file:
- You asked us to. You raised a support request that cannot be answered otherwise.
- A valid legal order. Where we are legally required to. We will tell you unless the order forbids it.
- A credible abuse report. Limited to what is necessary to assess the specific report.
Automated systems do process your files for the features you are using: generating streaming copies, reading audio properties, computing waveforms. That processing is mechanical and its output is only ever shown to you.
Copyright
You confirm you have the rights to what you upload. If you receive a valid infringement claim about content you have shared publicly through a link, we may disable that link. We would contact you first except where the law requires otherwise, and you can dispute it.
Disabling a link does not delete your files. See the copyright policy for the process.
Changes to this document
If we change this document in a way that reduces your rights over your own content, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Smaller clarifications are published with an updated date at the top.
Questions about anything here: legal@northwestfalls.com. A person reads that address.
This document is written to be read, not to be impressive. If any part of it is unclear, that is a fault in our writing and we would like to know about it.