Terms of service
Last updated 27 August 2026
These terms are the agreement between you and BuzzMusic. By making an account or using the site, you accept them. If you don't, don't use the site.
Who we are
BuzzMusic.live is operated from Flekkerøy, Norway.
Your account
You must be 16 or over to have a BuzzMusic account. We ask for your date of birth at signup and we will close accounts we find to be under age.
One person, one account. Choose a real email address you can receive mail at, and keep your password to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you.
Your username is public. Your email address is not, and is never shown to other members or to Artists.
If you upload music
You keep every right you had before you uploaded. BuzzMusic does not take ownership of your music, does not take a share of your songwriting, and does not sign you to anything.
What you give us is permission — a licence to store your tracks, convert them into the formats needed for playback, and stream them to listeners on BuzzMusic for as long as they are on the site. That licence ends when you remove the track, apart from copies kept in backups for a short period.
By uploading you confirm that:
- You own or control both the recording and the songwriting.
- It is not a cover version of someone else's song.
- Any samples, loops or contributions are cleared for commercial release.
- Nobody else's permission is needed, or you already have it in writing.
If someone claims a track is theirs, the process on the copyright page applies, and it forms part of these terms.
We check tracks before they appear publicly. We may decline to publish anything, and we do not have to explain why.
No royalties, and why
BuzzMusic does not pay Artists for plays. There is no per-stream rate, no royalty, no advertising share and no payment of any kind based on how many times your music is listened to. This is not a rate we have set low. It does not exist.
This is the difference between BuzzMusic and Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music, and it is deliberate. Those services pay you a fraction of a penny per play and keep your listeners to themselves. BuzzMusic does the opposite: you pay us a flat fee, we take nothing from what you earn from your music, tickets and downloads, and we show you where your audience is so you can go and earn from them.
What BuzzMusic actually is
A service and a storage provider. We host your music, convert it for playback, put it in front of listeners, and tell you what the listening data says. That is what your subscription buys.
We are not a record label, a distributor, a publisher, a performing rights organisation or a collection society. We do not sign Artists, do not own or administer any part of your work, do not register it anywhere on your behalf, and do not collect money for you from anyone else.
Where your money comes from
Playback exists so that people find you. The earning happens elsewhere:
- Selling your music — downloads and albums
- Selling tickets to your own shows
- Gigs and bookings arranged through the directory
On the Pro plan BuzzMusic takes no commission on any of that. The only money deducted is the payment provider's own fee for handling the card. What is left is yours.
Merchandise works differently, because BuzzMusic produces and ships the goods for you rather than only handling the payment. It is set out below.
Additional services
Separately from the above, BuzzMusic arranges optional services on Artists' behalf using outside suppliers and partners — festivals, seminars, studio tools and similar. These are not part of your subscription and you are never obliged to use any of them.
Where you order one, a small commission is included in the price at the point of ordering. It is charged once. Nothing is taken afterwards, and it never touches money you make from your own music, tickets or downloads.
Merchandise
Merchandise is one of the additional services above. You supply the artwork and choose what it goes on. BuzzMusic produces the goods and ships them, as a service you are buying from us.
You set the sale price. Before you list a product we show you what it costs to produce and deliver. You choose what to charge, and your margin is whatever sits above that cost. We do not set your price, and we keep no margin inside it.
When somebody buys, the production cost is taken out of the sale proceeds at that moment and the rest is yours. You hold no stock and you pay nothing up front — the sale pays for its own production. What you earned on a sale is fixed at the moment of that sale and does not change afterwards if you change your price.
If a buyer changes their mind and returns an item, the production cost is not recovered. These goods are printed for one order and cannot be put back into stock, so there is nothing to resell. Norwegian law gives a buyer fourteen days to withdraw from a purchase without giving a reason, we honour that, and our printer does not refund us for it. That loss falls on you as the person who set the price, so allow for it when deciding what to charge.
A faulty item is different. If something is misprinted, damaged, defective, the wrong item or lost on the way, our printer refunds the production cost and you lose only the margin on that sale — which you will not yet have been paid. You are never charged for a fault that was not yours.
Which of the two a return is gets decided by a person here, not by a box the buyer ticks, and a fault claim needs a photograph because our printer requires one. You are told the outcome and the reason, and so is the buyer.
Where a buyer is asked to pay the postage to send something back, that is stated on the product page and again at checkout, before they buy.
VAT on what you buy from us is yours to deal with. Our production charge to you is a business-to-business sale and carries VAT. If you are VAT registered you reclaim it in the normal way. If you are not, you cannot, and it is part of your cost — so allow for it in your price.
Earnings from merchandise become available on the same terms as everything else: thirty days after delivery, once the return period has passed. See Being paid.
Merchandise is a Pro plan feature and is sold to addresses in Norway only, priced in Norwegian kroner.
Still to be decided — who is the seller to the customer. You set the price and keep the proceeds, which points one way. The buyer checks out on BuzzMusic, pays our payment provider and receives a parcel with our name on the packing slip, which points the other. Which of us is the seller of record decides who carries VAT on the sale itself, who owes the buyer their fourteen-day right to cancel, and who answers a complaint. It is with a solicitor and is not settled by this draft. Nothing will go on sale until it is answered and this clause says plainly which it is.
The simple version. There are two kinds of thing here. If you are selling something you made — your music, your tickets, your downloads — BuzzMusic takes nothing but the payment provider's fee. If BuzzMusic is arranging or making something for you, you are buying a service from us and you pay for it once, at the point of ordering. Merchandise is the second kind: you set the price, we produce and ship, our cost comes out of the sale, and the rest is yours.
Refunds and returns
Returns and complaints are handled through BuzzMusic — you are not asked to deal with a buyer yourself, and you are never asked to take goods back. (Which of us is the seller of record for the purposes of consumer law is the open question flagged under Merchandise above.)
If an order is refunded, what you earned on it is reversed. If you have already been paid that money, the amount is taken from your next payout rather than requested back from you. On printed goods the production cost of a returned item is not recovered, as set out above.
Being paid
Earnings become available thirty days after delivery, once the return period has passed. You can request payment once your balance reaches the minimum shown on your dashboard. We will tell you before that minimum changes.
Your own rights bodies
If you are a member of TONO, PRS, BMI, ASCAP or any similar organisation, that relationship is yours and is unaffected by being here. We neither report to them nor pay them. If your membership requires you to register or declare where your music is published, doing so is your responsibility.
You must be unsigned
BuzzMusic is for unsigned Artists. To hold an Artist account you must not be under an exclusive recording contract with a record label for the music you upload.
To be clear about what that does and does not mean:
- Not allowed — an exclusive recording agreement with a label, major or independent, covering the tracks you want to put here.
- Fine — using a distribution service such as DistroKid, TuneCore or CD Baby. Those are not record labels and you remain unsigned.
- Fine — a publishing administration deal, or membership of a collection society.
- Fine — a one-off licence of a single track for a film, advert or compilation, as long as it does not stop you publishing the track yourself.
- Fine — having been signed in the past, provided the contract has ended and the rights have come back to you.
If you sign a recording contract while you have a BuzzMusic account, tell us within thirty days and remove anything the label now controls. You may keep an account for material that remains yours.
We cannot check any of this and we do not try to. You are declaring it.
If you sign, meeting your new obligations is entirely yours to do. Taking down tracks the label controls, changing what is on your profile, closing your account if that is what your contract requires — all of it is your responsibility and your deadline, not ours. BuzzMusic is not a party to any agreement you make with anyone else, has no way of knowing its terms, and cannot be held responsible for any consequence of your failing to act on it. If a declaration you made here turns out to be untrue, any claim that follows is yours to answer.
Your account is your responsibility
Everything in your account is yours to answer for — every track, every image, every word on your profile, every message you send and everything you sell through it. That applies whether you uploaded it, a bandmate did, or somebody using your password did.
Paying for BuzzMusic
Listening is free. Artists choose between Free, Rising and Pro, and businesses pay to be listed in the directory. Current prices are on the pricing page.
Billing
Paid plans renew automatically, monthly or yearly depending on what you chose, until you cancel. We'll email you before a yearly renewal.
Cancelling
Cancel any time from your settings. Your plan runs to the end of the period you've paid for, then drops to Free. Your music and your account stay — you simply lose the paid features.
Refunds
If you're in the EU or EEA you have fourteen days to change your mind about a new subscription and get your money back, unless you've asked us to start immediately and already used the paid features.
Outside that, we don't refund part-used periods, except where we've closed your account for a reason that turns out to be our mistake.
Price changes
We'll give you thirty days' notice by email before any price rises. If you don't want to pay the new price, cancel before it takes effect.
What you may not do
- Upload anything you don't have the rights to.
- Upload anything unlawful, abusive, threatening, or sexual involving anyone under 18.
- Pretend to be someone else, or set up a profile in another Artist's name.
- Inflate your play counts, whether by software or by arrangement.
- Take other members' details off the site for use elsewhere, including scraping the directory.
- Try to work out the identity of an individual listener from the statistics shown to you.
- Try to break, overload or get around the security of the site.
- Resell or redistribute anything you find here.
On messaging fans. The message you send to your followers is delivered by BuzzMusic and must be about your own music. You are not given your fans' details and must not try to obtain them, whether by combining statistics, by asking fans to identify themselves, or by any other means. Doing so closes the account.
Businesses and enquiries
Businesses listed in the directory are independent. BuzzMusic passes on enquiries and nothing more.
We don't vet, endorse, insure or guarantee any listed business. Whatever you agree with them — price, dates, cancellation, everything — is between you and them. We take no commission and accept no responsibility for how it turns out.
Businesses must keep their listing accurate and answer enquiries within a reasonable time. Listings that are wrong, abandoned or misleading will be removed without refund.
Ending your account
You can close your account whenever you like from settings. Your tracks come down, your profile disappears, and your personal information is deleted as described in the privacy policy.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms. Where it's sensible to do so we'll warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. For serious matters — stolen music, abuse, fraud, anything involving a minor — we'll close it straight away.
Three upheld copyright claims closes an account, as set out on the copyright page.
Liability and law
We work to keep BuzzMusic running, but we don't promise it will never be unavailable, never lose data, or never contain a mistake. Keep your own copies of your music. Do not treat BuzzMusic as your only backup.
The event calculator makes suggestions from the data available. They are suggestions, not predictions. Whether a gig sells is down to a great deal more than what we can see, and we accept no responsibility for money spent acting on one.
Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Beyond that, our liability to you is capped at what you have paid us in the previous twelve months.
These terms are governed by Norwegian law, and disputes go to the Norwegian courts. If you're a consumer, this doesn't take away rights you have under the law of your own country.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. For anything significant we'll email you thirty days beforehand. Carrying on using the site after that means you accept the change.
Questions: hello@buzzmusic.live