Terms of Service

1. The service

Walled Gardenis a curated music streaming co-op. Listeners pay $10/month for streaming access; after real platform costs, each listener's remaining subscription is allocated only to the artists they actually listened to that month.

2. Accounts

You are responsible for your account credentials and for the accuracy of information you provide. One account per person. We may suspend accounts engaged in fraud, streaming manipulation, rights violations, or abuse.

3. Subscriptions

Subscriptions are billed monthly through our website and can be canceled anytime, effective at the end of the billing period. Fees already allocated to artists are not refundable.

4. Artists and rights

Artists must own or control the rights to everything they upload, both the sound recording and the underlying musical composition, including samples, collaborator permissions, and any cloned or synthetic voices. Publishing on Walled Garden grants us the non-exclusive license needed to stream the recording and composition to subscribers, including mechanical and public-performance rights for works the artist wrote or controls. Cover songs and compositions published by third parties are not permitted unless the artist controls those publishing rights. Artists retain full ownership of their music. Violations of the human-led artist policy or AI-use policy may result in content removal, account suspension, and withheld payouts.

5. Payouts

Artist payouts are calculated monthly from qualified listening and paid according to the payout details on file, subject to fraud review and a minimum payout threshold. Fraudulent streams never earn payouts.

6. Taxes

You are solely responsible for determining, reporting, and paying any taxes that apply to payouts you receive, including any income, self-employment, VAT, GST, or other taxes in your country of residence. Walled Garden does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice, and nothing in these terms or on the platform is such advice.

Before we can pay you, you may be required to provide accurate tax information. If you are a US person, this includes a valid Form W-9. If you are not a US person, this includes a valid Form W-8 (for example W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E). We may be required to withhold amounts from your payouts, or to report payments to tax authorities, as required by applicable law. We may delay, withhold, or reverse payouts until required and accurate tax information is on file, and you are responsible for keeping that information current. You agree that the tax information you provide is true and complete.

7. Acceptable use

No bots, stream manipulation, scraping of audio, account sharing at scale, or attempts to game user-centric allocation. We monitor for abnormal listening and payout patterns.

8. Changes

Material changes to these terms will be announced to members before taking effect. Core mission principles are additionally protected by the co-op charter.