Terms and Conditions

GENERAL

These Terms regulate the conduct of the users and the operators of this website ("theSonicShow.com", and any other names by which it may be available). Any use made of this site is subject to these Terms, which is a legal agreement between you and the site operator (Tender Soft Ltd, a company registered in Wales, Great Britain number 3040700; and any other organization with whom it shares or transfers its business interests).

The laws applicable to this agreement wil be those of England & Wales.

A "GROWN-UP" SERVICE

To tick the agreement required to register for an account, you must be at least 18 years of age. If you are under 18, but at least 13, you may register if your parent or guardian ticks the box for you. It should be noted that the services we provide are "adult" in the sense of being "grown-up". Although we do not condone abusiveness when using our services, please appreciate that artists may deal with adult themes in their work, and may express themselves in robust language. This is a grown-up service for grown-ups. If you are capable of being offended by the utterance of (certain) words alone, or by the raising of any issues or themes, then you should not use, nor register for, this service. Similarly, you should not register any 13 - 18 year-olds whom you wish to protect from access to such material.

RIGHTS

Any rights granted to you under this Agreement will become immediately void if it is ever terminated. Until then, and subject to this full Agreement, the benefits conferred upon you include:

  • The right to listen to and download for reasonable personal use (as described below), any Artists' material made available via the Free Downloads section of this website.
  • The right to listen to, and rate, but not to download or store, any material made available via the Auditions section of this website.

Reasonable personal use under this Agreement is defined as:

  • Use on any computer to which only you have access (and use on shared computers where you are able, e.g. with encryption-based access control measures, to exclude any other parties from gaining access to the relevant files).
  • Use on other devices such as portable MP3 music players, providing that you delete all such material before allowing others access to the device.
  • Transferring the material to up to 3 (three) audio CDs, providing that they are for your own personal use and are not shared with others.
  • You may also share material stored as above with any of your dependent children only, if they do not have their own Sonic Show accounts.
  • You may also retain a single copy of any material on a reasonable backup medium to which only you have access, provided that it is well protected (e.g. with encryption or effective physical security).

PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES

The following is a non-exhaustive list of rights not granted under this Agreement:

  • You may not re-publish or share any material provided by this site.
  • You may not use the material provided by this site for any kind of public performance. (You may not play it at parties / gatherings for paying guests.)
  • If a track has been withdrawn by the artist before you have downloaded it, you may not obtain it from elsewhere for any usage under the terms of this Agreement.
  • You may not make any modifications to the files downloaded from this site (except for the technical modifications involved in re-saving to different formats, including any bitrate changes made in compressing files).
  • Any rights under this Agreement are granted in respect of the files made available for download from this site only, and not the material that they represent. For example, if you discover a higher-bitrate CD version of a track available on this site, your right to make personal copies of the file downloaded here does not extend to the higher-quality CD version.

GUARANTEED FREEDOM

We guarantee that basic membership of this site - which includes the right to make personal use of any applicable material downloaded from this site - will remain free for as long as this site operates. We will not require any upgrade to a paying service for continued rights to use freely provided material, and we will not use our right to terminate this Agreement (below) to coerce members into making any kind of payment.

TERMS FOR ARTISTS

You must own the complete rights to any work you list on this site, or be acting under the written instructions of the owner. This generally means that any work you list here must be completely original: unauthorized "covers" or plagarism are a breach of our terms, for which you alone accept responsibility.

Bear in mind that you must not have sold or licenced your rights to other parties who have not consented to the relevant work appearing here. So if you have a record deal covering the tracks you'd like to upload: you need your record company's (written) permission to do so.

By making your work available here, you agree to grant our members rights described in this Agreement. These rights may be updated from time to time. If you do not accept any changes, you should withdraw some or all of your work.

You may if you wish grant our members additional rights, but you may not impose upon our members terms and conditions that limit the rights described herein. As long as they are in compliance with this Agreement, members need take no further action to be in compliance with your own terms in relation to the material you upload for listing here.

You grant our members lifetime access to the material you allow them to download. While they will be required to delete all of your material if they breach or terminate this Agreement, they will not be required to delete any material that they have obtained from this site and which you subsequently de-list.

You may at any time withdraw work from this service by logging in and deleting the relevant songs. Your work will normally be immediately de-listed, but there may be a delay of up to two hours for completely removing files, to protect users who are already part-way through the download process.

TERMINATION

These Terms may be modified from time to time. If you do not agree to any changes, you must immediately withdraw from this service and terminate any benefits you have been granted by it. On termination of your membership, your right to make any use of any recordings issued to you under this agreement is also terminated. You must immediately and permanently remove all such work (for example by permanently deleting all relevant files and destroying CDs). Force of criminal law applies, see below.

You may terminate this Agreement at any time, for any reason. Your termination can be considered effective from as soon as you have deleted or destroyed all copies of all material granted to you under this Agreement and permanently ceased to make use of all Agreement benefits; but you should still notify us of your termination at the usual contact address.

We may terminate your membership for any reason we deem condusive to the best enjoyment of this site by the greatest number of people. Valid reasons for termination would include: abuse (of our staff or fellow users of the site), criminal obscenity, breaches of copyright, damage to our computer systems (including failure to take reasonable measures to report potential security problems you notice, or sharing your login details with others).

You warrant, in signing up for membership, that we have not previously banned you from our services (perhaps in "another guise", such as a different name or email address). You acknowledge that we are entitled to ban people who have abused other services in the manner described in this Agreement or in breach of their respective terms.

PRIVACY

We respect your privacy. We will not pass your email address to any third parties (unless required to for law enforcement purposes). We will not send you email messages unless you opt in to receive them, and will always provide a means to opt out. Some email messages may be required to service your account, such as password notification and reminders. We also require all members to notify us of any change of email address, and we shall be entitled to send you a message once a year to confirm that your registered address is still valid.

We use cookies to record the fact that you have successfully logged in, so that you will not need to repeat your login information with every page request. As such, these cookies are not stored on your PC (and may generally be removed by closing all browser windows). If we do ever offer you the opportunity to store any cookie (which at present we do not), this opportunity will be explained to you at the time and you will be able to choose whether to accept it.

We may take reasonable steps to deter and detect illegal re-copying of the material which we provide for members' personal use only, to facilitate appropriate managerial or legal action to protect the integrity of our services. We are entitled to modify the files we deliver in a way that does not significantly affect their performance but which tags the file with a unique identifier. This would be undertaken so as not to affect your enjoyment nor legitimate privacy, but only to facilitate a possible reactive traceability back to the original downloader in the event of a demonstrable breach of our terms.

CRIMINAL FORCE

We do encourage you to share the music you enjoy: but the only legal means of doing this is by informing your friends that they can download it, for free, from this site, by creating their own account.

Please note that if the track has been withdrawn by the artist, then there is no longer a legal way of obtaining it via our services. You are under no circumstances permitted to share your own copies. (You should therefore encourage your friends to obtain their own accounts as quickly as possible: since when they're too late, it's too late.)

Unauthorized copying of artists' work is a criminal offence in most territories, and certainly in the one in which this agreement is made (England & Wales, UK), and under international treaties. Our Terms are generous and extend your rights considerably, but you will lose all rights under them, and the protection that they confer, if you fail to abide by them.

Therefore, any breach of these Terms is likely to give rise to a criminal offence under the copyright laws of England & Wales; and may also be criminal and / or extraditable in your resident jurisdiction. In dealing with them, we would expect the high level of international cooperation and authority afforded the music industry in tackling issues of "piracy".

You therfore acknowledge that in the event of such breaches being uncovered or reasonably suspected, we may call on law enforcement agencies and their specialist internet units to use their resources and authority to take any necessary steps to assist us in obtaining a remedy. This could include, for example, the release to police of ISP records to enable the precise identification of computer users to uncover members' true identities.

MISREPRESENTATION, BREACHES AND DAMAGES

You understand and agree that if in obtaining and using your membership, you have misrepresented any fact or knowingly breached any of our Terms, you have no rights under this agreement. In such an event, any benefits you have obtained (such as the downloading of music) have been obtained illegally and fraudulently. You accept that, in these circumstances, we and our partners are entitled to criminal damages. You agree that you will not contest the amount of any estimate of such damages that does not exceed $3,000 (USD); although our suggestion of that figure does not put us under any obligation not to seek a higher sum if we believe that the actual damages that you have caused to be suffered are greater.

VALIDITY

This Agreement confers upon you rights that you would not normally possess (that is, the right to download and enjoy copyrighted material without making any associated payment). It follows that should this Agreement be deemed to be invalid, then no rights can have been transferred under it - and you would be required to remove all copies of any material you have obtained from this site as they would then be unlicensed. Alternatively, with the consent of all relevant parties, we would be entitled to impose any replacement Agreement.