Terms of Use

1 Who you are dealing with

Dynasty Haiti is a marketplace for Haitian music. We host recordings, take payment for them, and pass most of what is paid to the artist. We are not the label, the publisher or the manager of the artists on the site, and except where we say otherwise we do not own the recordings. Reach us at [email protected].

2 Your account

You can listen and preview without an account. You need one to buy, to keep what you bought, or to put music up.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything somebody does with it if you share your password. Tell us as soon as you think somebody else has access. One person, one account: creating several to like your own music, to claim other people's work, or to get around a suspension is a reason for us to close all of them.

You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live. If you are not, an adult responsible for you has to agree to these terms on your behalf.

3 What you get when you buy a track

Buying a recording gives you a permanent, personal licence to keep it, play it, and copy it to devices you use. It does not sell you the recording or the song. It is not a licence to broadcast it, play it in a business, put it in a video, sample it, resell it, or upload it anywhere else. Those uses need permission from the rights holder, and we cannot give it to you.

The licence is yours and not a copy you can lend. Putting a record you have bought into a playlist — your own or a public one — shares the name of it, not the record: everybody else on that list still hears the preview and the price unless they have bought it themselves.

What you buy stays in your library and can be downloaded again. If a recording is later removed from sale — a rights dispute, a takedown, an artist withdrawing it — you keep what you already downloaded, but we may not be able to serve it to you again. Downloading your purchases and keeping a copy is worth doing.

4 Your balance

You can hold a balance to buy with. It is prepayment for music on this site, and nothing else: it is not a bank account, it earns no interest, it is not insured, and it cannot be sent to another person except through the top-up feature that names the person receiving it.

A balance does not expire. If you want money back that you have not spent, write to us and we will look at it — we will normally refund an unspent top-up to the method it came from, less any fee the payment provider has already taken and does not return.

Because a balance is money, an account that holds one has to have a working email address on it. That is how we reach you about it.

5 Paying, and refunds

Payments are handled by MonCash, NatCash, KashPaw, Stripe and others. We do not see or store your card number or your mobile-money PIN. Their terms apply to the payment itself, and a problem with a payment that never reached us is one they have to resolve.

A download is delivered immediately and cannot usually be returned, so purchases are final. We will still refund where something went wrong on our side: a file that does not play, a file that is not the song described, a duplicate charge, or a purchase you did not make. Write to us with the order and we will sort it out.

Prices are set by the artist and shown before you pay. Where a payment is taken in another currency, the rate is the one shown at the time.

6 Putting your music up

When you upload a recording you are telling us, and we are relying on it, that you made it or have the rights to distribute and sell it; that everybody who should be credited and paid has agreed; that the artwork is yours to use; and that samples, features and interpolations are cleared. If any of that is not true, you are the one responsible for what follows.

You keep ownership of everything you upload. Nothing here sells us the recording or the song. What you give us is permission to do the things listed in the next section, and nothing beyond them.

The permission is non-exclusive: the same recording is yours to sell anywhere else at the same time. It lasts while the recording is on the site, and for a short while after, so that copies already sold keep working.

You can take a recording down. Doing so does not undo licences already granted to people who bought it.

7 Previews, playlists and the radio

A recording that is for sale is never played in full to somebody who has not bought it, anywhere on this site, except on the radio. Everywhere else — the shop, the record's own page, a player embedded on another site, and any playlist, including one a listener made — they hear a preview of no more than 30 seconds and then the price.

It is played in full to the people entitled to hear it in full: somebody who has bought it, you as the artist who uploaded it, and everybody if you have marked it free. Somebody putting your record into a playlist does not change that. A playlist is a list of records, not a copy of them, and each record in it is played under whatever permission the listener already has.

The radio is the one exception, and it is a paid one. The station plays records whole, including records that are for sale, and every play pays you the airplay rate — that payment is what the permission to broadcast is for. The rate is shown in your dashboard, it can change, and a change never applies to money already credited.

Marking a recording free is a decision with a consequence: it lets anybody play it in full, as often as they like, without paying and without an account. You can put the price back at any time, and plays that already happened stay as they are.

Alongside that, we may use the title, your artist name and the artwork to promote the recording on this site, in our app, and on social media, and we may include a preview of it in that promotion.

If we ever want to do more than this — full streaming of records that are for sale to people who have not bought them, on any terms — we will ask you first and tell you what it pays. We will not take it from a sentence in this page.

8 What you earn, and getting it out

You earn from sales, from tips, and from likes. The artist share of a sale, the tip share, and the amount likes pay are shown in your dashboard and can change; a change applies from the day it is made and never to money already credited.

Where you have set splits, each collaborator is credited their share automatically at the moment of sale. Setting a split is your statement that they agreed to it. Disputes between collaborators are between them, though we will hold a disputed amount while it is sorted out.

Likes pay only where they look like they came from people. A like from an account that is too new, from an artist on their own record, or from a run we judge to be manufactured does not pay, and we may reverse amounts already credited from likes we later find were bought or faked.

You can request a withdrawal once you have verified who you are. Withdrawals go out by MonCash, NatCash or bank transfer. We may hold a withdrawal while we check a rights complaint, a chargeback, or unusual activity on the account, and we will tell you why.

Tax on what you earn is yours to handle. We do not withhold it and we do not advise on it.

9 When we take something off sale

We remove recordings from sale for reasons including: the file is incomplete, a rough mix or a demo; the audio will not play or is not the song described; the quality is too poor to sell; there are DJ drops on a paid track; the artwork is not yours; the same recording is on the site twice; or there is a question about who holds the rights.

When we do, we write to you saying which of those it is, and the reason appears on the record in your dashboard. Fix it and upload it again and we put it back. Money the recording earned before it was held stays yours.

10 Copyright complaints

If something here infringes your rights, write to [email protected] with: what the work is, where it is on this site, why you believe it is infringing, your contact details, and a statement that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them. We will take the recording off sale while we look at it and tell the person who uploaded it, who may answer.

Accounts that infringe repeatedly are closed, and money earned from infringing recordings is not paid out.

11 Claiming a record as yours

Much of the catalogue was uploaded before the artists arrived. If a recording of yours is here under another name you can claim it, and you will be asked to sign a statement that it is yours. We record that signature, the date and the address it came from.

Claiming something that is not yours is fraud, and the account will be closed. Where a claim is approved, earnings the recording already made may be moved to you — how much is worked out from the paid orders, and we tell you the figure.

12 Things you must not do

Do not upload recordings you have no right to. Do not manufacture plays, likes or sales, whether by hand, by script, or by paying somebody. Do not re-upload, resell or redistribute what you buy here. Do not attempt to reach files, accounts or data that are not yours, to get around payment, or to disrupt the service. Do not use the site to launder money.

13 Suspension and closing accounts

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we will say why unless telling you would get in the way of an investigation or we are not allowed to. A balance you paid in stays yours and we will return what is unspent. Earnings from activity we find to be fraudulent are not paid out.

You can close your own account at any time. Recordings you sold stay with the people who bought them.

14 What we do not promise

We try to keep the service running and the files safe, and we cannot promise it will always be available or free of faults. Internet and power in Haiti are not something we control. Keep your own copies of anything you upload — we take backups, and a backup is not a substitute for your own master.

Nothing here limits rights you have under the law that cannot be limited by agreement. Beyond that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our liability for anything connected to your use of the service is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it happened.

15 Changes

We update these terms when the service changes. The date at the top tells you which version you are reading. When a change matters — how you are paid, what we may do with your recordings, what a purchase gets you — we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect. Carrying on using the service after that is acceptance.

16 Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Haiti, and the courts of Port-au-Prince have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer somewhere else, this does not take away protections you have where you live.