Privacy — JW MUSIC

Nothing is stored on your device. Nothing goes to anybody else. Every number on this page is a clock something actually runs — and where a thing has no clock, this page says so rather than leaving you to assume one.

Who this notice is from

Who decides what happens to this: JW MUSIC LIMITED
Company number: 08646430; Registered in England and Wales
Where to write: The contact form, choosing Data and privacy. It is the address for everything on this page, including anything you think is wrong with it.
Full company details: The registered company details are on the terms page, which is where this site keeps them once — who runs this site.

This notice covers the site and nothing else. The other JW sites — JW HIVE, JW SHOP, JW XTRA — are run by a different company, and each has its own notice. The registered number above is the only thing that tells the two companies apart, which is why it is printed rather than described.

There is nothing on this site to sign in to, so none of what follows sits behind an account. Most of it is about people who sent us something once.

Words we use here

Three words below are used more narrowly than they would be in conversation. Each is defined once, and every later use of one is a link back to its definition — so a section you have arrived at from somebody else's link still tells you what it means without sending you to the top of the page to find out.

The site means jwmusic.uk and the pages under it. It does not mean the streaming services a Listen on link takes you to, and it does not mean the label's pages on anybody else's platform.
Cleared means we take the parts of a record that say who you were, or where the request came from, out of it and keep the rest. It is not the same as anonymous and this page never calls it that: where a record already names an account, what is left still points at a person. Cleared means less about you, not nothing about you.
Deleted means the record itself goes from the database this site runs on. Copies we keep in case a server is lost can outlive it by months — why deleting is not always the end of it says how long, and it is the reason this page never promises a deletion without saying so.

What we hold, and for how long

A demo you send: Your name, your email address, the link or the file, and anything you wrote with it. The file goes with the rest.; Deleted 90 days after you send it
A message through the contact form: Your name, your address, what you said it was about, and what you wrote. It becomes a thread, and a reply from either of us is part of it.; Deleted six years after the last message in it
An address you gave us for new releases: The address, which list it is on, and the date you gave it. Nothing else, and it is used for nothing else — emails you asked for.; Kept until you take it off · no time limit
A reminder for one record: The address you gave, and which record you asked about. It puts you on no other list. This one has no clock on it: we keep it, and a person removes it if you ask.; Kept · nothing deletes it automatically
Visits to a page: One line per page view, with a value standing in for a visitor, today and no address in it — counting visits.; Per-view rows 30 days · daily totals kept · the day's key destroyed within 48 hours
A record that you sent something: Every write to this site leaves a line saying what was asked for, when, from which address and by which browser. Three rules below decide how long the address stays.; 90 days or 400 days, by what the record is
Counters that stop a form being flooded: A count against a scrambled version of the address, and of the email address where a form has one. The scramble is one way, and it is not anonymous: an address is a short thing to guess, so anyone holding the list could try them all. It is shorthand for an address, not a substitute for one.; Thrown away nightly, once the window it counts has passed
The web server's own logs: Your address, the line your browser sent and what it says it is — what the server writes down to run the site.; About seven weeks
Email in our mailbox: If you write to us by email, or reply to something we sent, a copy of that message also sits in the mailbox it arrived in. This one has no clock on it either, and saying so is better than letting the rest of this list imply one.; Kept · nothing deletes it automatically

The three rules for the last kind of record are the ones worth reading, because they are not what you would guess. They turn on what the record is, not on who sent it.

If the request was refused — a form sent too often, a sign-in that failed — the whole line is kept as it is for 400 days and then deleted outright. The address is the record there; clearing it would leave something that helps nobody and accumulates for ever.
If the request went through and nobody was signed in — which is every visitor to this site — the address and the browser are cleared at 90 days. That is deliberately the same 90 days as a demo, so a demo and the record of the request that sent it lose the address on the same night.
If somebody was signed in, on one of our other services, the address and the browser are cleared at 400 days and the line itself is kept. It already names the account, so what is left is still about a person — which is exactly why this page calls it cleared and not anonymous.

Our own scheduled jobs write lines here too. They never carry an address, because there is nobody at the other end of one.

Counting visits

We count which pages are read. Nothing about that count is put on your device: no cookie, no entry in your browser's own storage, no fingerprint taken so that we recognise you next time. The cookies page is the whole of what is on your machine, and it is one session cookie that arrives only when you are about to send us something. This section is the other half — what happens on our side.

For each page view our server writes one line to a file of its own: the time, an id for that one request, whether it worked, the country it arrived from, the page — without anything after the ? — which record or artist the page was about, and one value standing in for a visitor, today. If you arrived on a link we had tagged for a campaign, the tag in that link is recorded too. Where you came from otherwise is not: no referrer is kept in the count.

That last value is made by mixing the address the request came from and the browser it announces itself as with a key: 32 random bytes, new every day. Only the result is written down. The address and the browser string are not in the line, not in a column, and not anywhere else in the count.

The key that turns your address into that day's number is held in the server's memory, not in a file on its disk. It is destroyed within 48 hours — sooner if the server restarts — and it is in none of our backups and none of our hosting provider's disk images. Once it is gone, nobody can turn a stored number back into a visitor: not us, not someone who takes the database, not a court order.

While that day's key still exists, the value it made is not anonymous — there are only about four billion addresses, and anyone holding the key could try them all. That is why the destruction is the whole point of the design rather than a detail of it.

Two things follow that we would rather have and do not. We cannot tell a returning reader from a new one, because yesterday's key is gone and nothing joins your Monday to your Tuesday. And we cannot follow anyone between our sites, because the name of the site goes into the calculation. Any returning visitors figure we published would be invented.

The per-view rows are deleted after 30 days. What is kept is the daily totals — views, visitors, plays, per day — and they hold no value that stands for a person; they are a table of numbers.

One thing on this site needs a script: pressing play sends a single request saying which track was played. It sets no cookie and answers with nothing. It exists because a server cannot tell a person pressing play from a browser fetching the first few seconds of audio on its own, and reporting one as the other would be misleading rather than merely imprecise.

What the server writes down to run the site

Running a public website means the server keeps ordinary logs of its own. They are not the count above, they are never joined to it, and they exist to keep the site up and to look into abuse when it happens.

The access log holds the address a request came from, the time, the line your browser sent — including anything after the ? — whether it worked, the page a file was asked for from, and the browser's own description of itself. It is kept for about seven weeks and then rotated away. The error log holds the same address on any line recording an error, and is kept the same way.

Pages themselves go to the measurement log and not to this one. What lands here are the files a page loads — stylesheets, scripts, images — and anything our software never handled at all.

We would rather write fewer of these lines than we do, and there is work ready to narrow what this site contributes to them. Until it is done, the paragraph above is what is true.

Nobody else, and the one company in the middle

No other company is given anything from the site, and none is asked to be: no analytics service, no advertising network, no consent vendor, no CAPTCHA, no embedded player. The player is the one that costs us something — a play button from a streaming service brings that service onto the page with it — so there is not one. Every Listen on link is a plain link out, and once you follow it you are on somebody else's site under their notice.

Your browser does fetch things from another address while you read: the sleeves and the audio come from content.jwhive.com and stream.jwhive.com. Those are ours. A different address is not a different party — which is why the claim on this page is no third party and never no other origin.

One company is genuinely in the middle, and it is ours to explain rather than yours to discover. The site is delivered through Cloudflare, which sits in front of our server: every request reaches them before it reaches us. Whatever they keep about that is on their machines and outside ours, and nothing on our side can measure it — so this page tells you they are there rather than answering for them. They also ask your browser to report a request to this site that fails: which address did not arrive, and why. Not what you read.

Emails you asked for

If you give us your address to hear about new records, it goes on one list — JW MUSIC — with the date you gave it. It is used for that, it is given to nobody, and there is no time limit on it: it stays until you take it off.

Every email from that list carries a link that takes you off it. It needs no account, no cookie and no second confirming click, and it does not expire — a link in a message sent years ago still works, and pressing it twice is not an error.

Taking you off does not delete the fact that you asked. We record the withdrawal, keyed so that it survives the address itself being deleted, and every send checks it before it writes to anybody. Deleting the record instead would lose the one piece of evidence that you asked us to stop — which is the thing you would want us to have if we ever wrote to you again.

Asking to be reminded about a single record is not that list. That signup is scoped to the record you asked about and puts you on nothing else. The link above still stops the mail — the withdrawal is checked before every send, this one included — but it does not remove the signup itself. Ask us and a person takes it off.

Why deleting is not always the end of it

Everything above is about the database and the log files this site runs on. We also copy them, so that the site and everything in it can come back after a server is lost. A copy is not reached by a clock.

So a record deleted or cleared on a given night can still exist for a while afterwards: in a monthly copy for roughly five months, in the last few nightly copies, and in the last handful taken before a change was deployed — which are kept by count rather than by date, so no date bounds them. A copy taken by hand and marked to keep is never forgotten at all.

We can tell you when something leaves the live site, and every period on this page is that. We cannot tell you that the last copy of it went on the same night. A page that promises that has not looked.

What you can ask us to do

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop doing something with it, and object to the counting described above. Use the contact form and choose Data and privacy: that is what makes it recognisable as a request with a deadline on it rather than a message that can wait until somebody has an afternoon. We answer within a month.

What that looks like in practice, honestly. One address goes in, and the mailing list and the accounts our other services hold are answered straight away; the rest is a list of named places we go through one at a time. It is a person doing it rather than a button you press.

Three things we will not simply delete, and it is better to know before you ask than after:

The record of a refused request. The address in it is the record, it is what tells us a site is being attacked, and it goes on its own schedule — 400 days.
The note that you asked us to stop emailing you. It is kept on purpose, and it outlives the address it was about, because it is the only thing that stops a later list putting you back on.
Anything already in a copy of the database. It goes when that copy does — why deleting is not always the end of it.

If you are not happy with how we answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's regulator, at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, but that is your right and not our permission to give.

Changes to this notice

When this page changes, the date in the header changes with it and the change is written into the list below. A section keeps its address when its wording changes: the links here and the fragment in your browser's address bar are named after what a section is about rather than where it sits, so a paragraph somebody quoted in an email still resolves to the same paragraph after two more have been added above it.

If a period on this page gets longer, or something new starts being collected, that is a change to this page on the day it happens rather than afterwards.

17 September 2026: First published. Nothing was replaced: there was no privacy notice before this one, and both the cookies page and the terms page said so rather than summarising one that did not exist. Those two sentences are gone with this page's arrival.; Version 1

This notice describes the site as it stood on 17 September 2026. Every period on it is one something on our server actually carries out; the entries with nothing enforcing one say so in the list above rather than being left out of it.