1. Who We Are
FreqBlog ("the Platform") is operated by Steven Birring trading as Stackbase / FreqBlog, 12 Rydal Avenue, Nuneaton, UK, CV11 6HX ("we", "us", "our"). Our contact email is [email protected]. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under registration number CSN0293296.
2. Products and Services Covered
These terms apply to the products and services offered via freqblog.com and its subdomains:
- Music Metadata API — a developer API for audio feature analysis at api.freqblog.com
3. Consumer Rights
If you are a consumer (an individual using our services wholly outside of any trade, business, or profession), your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 are not affected by these terms. This includes any right to a 14-day cooling-off period for digital services where applicable under law.
4. API Keys (Music Metadata API)
Your API key is personal to you and your registered use case. You must not share, resell, or publish your API key. If we reasonably believe your key has been compromised or misused, we reserve the right to revoke it and issue a replacement.
You must not use the API to reproduce or resell bulk catalog data, reverse-engineer our analysis models, upload audio files you do not have rights to process, or conduct automated abuse against our infrastructure.
When you upload an audio file via /analyze, you warrant that you own the file or hold a licence permitting its upload and processing. Uploaded audio files are not stored beyond the analysis duration.
5. Payment and Cancellation
Subscription products are billed monthly or annually as stated at point of purchase. Payment is due at the start of each billing period. Prices are shown in GBP. We are not currently VAT registered; no VAT is charged. If we become VAT registered we will provide at least 30 days' notice before VAT is added to billing.
You may cancel any subscription at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We do not offer refunds for partial months or unused portions of a subscription, except where required by law.
We reserve the right to change pricing with 30 days' notice. Continued use after the notice period constitutes acceptance of the new price.
6. Acceptable Use
You must not use any FreqBlog product or service to:
- Violate any applicable law or regulation
- Infringe any third-party intellectual property rights
- Conduct automated attacks, scraping, or abuse against our infrastructure
- Resell, redistribute, or sublicense access to our products without our written consent
- Misrepresent our analysis or metadata as authoritative, certified, or error-free
6.1 Standing consent for in-product caching (paid plans)
The written consent referred to above is granted as standard, with no separate letter required, to any account on an active paid plan (Hobbyist, Starter, Pro or Enterprise), on the following terms.
- What this permits. You may call the API server-side from your application, and display, store and use the audio-feature values we return — and values you derive from them — inside that application for your users, including where it is sold as a paid product. You may cache those values and serve them to any of your users rather than re-querying per user. This is permitted and encouraged: it is cheaper for you and lighter for us.
- Internal use only. The cached data is for use inside your application. It must not be exposed to anyone outside it as an API, feed, export or dataset, and must not be used to build a product whose purpose is supplying music metadata to third parties.
- No bulk redistribution. This does not permit reproducing or reselling bulk catalogue data (Section 4). Making our catalogue available for download, sync or bulk transfer, in whole or in substantial part, sits outside this consent and is a separate written licence. The Enterprise plan includes such an export.
- Attribution. Credit “Audio analysis by FreqBlog” somewhere a user can reasonably find it — an about screen, credits panel or settings page is fine. It does not need to appear on every track row.
- Unresolved tracks. Where we return no features for a track you may
cache that as a temporary negative result, but not a permanent one. Terminal verdicts
carry a
retry_after_daysvalue for exactly this purpose. The catalogue grows daily, so a permanently cached miss will under-represent what we cover. - Wind-down. If your subscription ends, or this consent is withdrawn, you may keep serving already-cached values to existing users for 90 days and must stop making new API calls. After 90 days, delete the cached FreqBlog data. Anything a user has edited themselves, and any data you hold independently of us, is unaffected.
This consent is non-exclusive, non-transferable and not sublicensable. It transfers no ownership (Section 9) and does not vary the disclaimers or the limitation of liability in Sections 10 and 11 — our audio features are estimates, not guarantees — and it commits us to no particular catalogue size, coverage level or uptime. It is conditional on an active qualifying subscription and on continued compliance with these terms, and takes effect while that subscription is active. We may withdraw it on 30 days' written notice, or immediately on material breach of these terms.
6.2 Free accounts: non-commercial use only
A free key may be used for non-commercial purposes only. On that basis, the terms of Section 6.1 apply to free accounts as well, with the changes below.
- What counts as non-commercial. Personal and hobby projects, learning, academic and non-profit research, and evaluating or prototyping the API before you decide to buy. Evaluating includes trying the API at work; using it in a business's live product or its internal operations is commercial. Publishing your project's source code is fine.
- What counts as commercial. Any use in or for a product or service that charges users, carries advertising or sponsorship, sells subscriptions or in-app purchases, or is run for a business, a client or paid work. This applies whether or not the project earns money yet, so a start-up that plans to is commercial. Voluntary donations to a free project, where donors get nothing extra in return, don't make it commercial. Commercial use needs a paid plan, and from then on Section 6.1 applies.
- Storing and caching. While your key is active you may store and cache the values we return, and values you derive from them, and use them inside your non-commercial project. The Internal use only, No bulk redistribution, Attribution and Unresolved tracks rules of Section 6.1 apply unchanged. Don't publish cached FreqBlog values as a file or dataset, including in a public code repository.
- Research. You may publish findings, aggregate statistics and small illustrative excerpts (for example a table of a few tracks in a paper) with attribution. Publishing the underlying values as a dataset is redistribution and is not covered.
- If your project becomes commercial. Move to a paid plan, or stop using FreqBlog data in it and delete the cached data within 30 days.
- Wind-down. If your free key is revoked or you close your account, stop making API calls and delete the cached FreqBlog data within 30 days. Anything a user has edited themselves, and any data you hold independently of us, is unaffected.
The final paragraph of Section 6.1 (non-exclusive, no ownership, no change to the disclaimers or liability limits, withdrawal) applies to this permission too, except that for a free account it depends on an active free key rather than a paid subscription. Free keys are also subject to Section 7, including one key per person.
Not sure whether your use is commercial? Email us and we will give you an answer in writing. Any other use outside Sections 6.1 and 6.2 needs our written consent.
7. Rate Limits and Fair Use (API)
Each API plan carries monthly request allowances and per-minute rate limits as published on the pricing page. Requests exceeding the monthly allowance will be rejected with a 429 response until the next billing period. We reserve the right to throttle or suspend access for usage patterns that place unreasonable load on the service.
Free keys are limited to one per person. Creating additional accounts to get more than the free allowance breaches these terms. If our checks find it, we may revoke the free keys involved straight away, without advance notice, and stop the email addresses concerned from creating new free keys. A revoked key's requests are refused with a message telling you how to contact us. If you think we have got it wrong, email [email protected] and a person will review it. Revoking free keys under this paragraph never affects a paid key.
Apart from a breach or suspected abuse (Section 14), or if we discontinue the service, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before withdrawing a free key.
8. Service Availability
We aim to keep all products operational and will make reasonable efforts to maintain uptime. However, we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. Services may be unavailable for maintenance, updates, or reasons outside our control. We are not liable for any loss arising from service downtime.
9. Intellectual Property
All content on this platform — including software, APIs, and associated documentation — is our intellectual property unless otherwise stated. These terms do not transfer any ownership rights to you.
10. Disclaimer of Warranties
All products are provided "as is". We make no warranties, express or implied, regarding accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Audio analysis results and music metadata are provided as-is and should be treated as estimates, not guarantees.
11. Limitation of Liability
Nothing in these terms shall limit or exclude our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law.
Subject to the above, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, we shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of any FreqBlog product. Our maximum aggregate liability to you for any claim shall not exceed the fees you paid to us in the three months preceding the claim.
12. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Stackbase, FreqBlog, and their operators from any claims, damages, losses, or expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of our products, your breach of these terms, or your infringement of any third-party rights.
13. Force Majeure
We shall not be in breach of these terms or liable for any delay or failure to perform our obligations where such delay or failure results from events beyond our reasonable control, including but not limited to: acts of God, power failures, internet or infrastructure outages, acts of government, or third-party service failures.
14. Termination
We may suspend or terminate your access immediately if you breach these terms, if we reasonably suspect fraudulent or abusive activity, or if we discontinue the service. Where possible we will provide advance notice. On termination, any outstanding balance becomes immediately due.
15. Changes to These Terms
We may update these terms from time to time. We will notify registered users by email at least 14 days before material changes take effect. Continued use of any product after that date constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.
16. Governing Law
These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.
17. Contact
Questions about these terms? Email us at [email protected] or write to Steven Birring, 12 Rydal Avenue, Nuneaton, UK, CV11 6HX.