Privacy policy

If you don't have an account

You can create, join and use lobbies without giving us any personal information.

• In your browser: a random session ID, your nickname, your volume, and your light/dark and chat window preferences are saved in your browser's local storage so they survive a refresh. Clearing your browser data removes them.
• Public lobbies: if the host switches on “Open to everyone”, the lobby is listed on the homepage with its code, its room name, the song playing and how many people are listening. Names, nicknames and chat are never listed. The host can turn it off at any time, and the listing disappears when everyone leaves.
• In a lobby: your nickname, the queue, playback position, emoji reactions and the last 100 chat messages are kept in the server's memory only, and are shared with the other people in that lobby. They're deleted when the lobby closes 15 minutes after everyone has left (or when the server restarts). There are two exceptions. A signed-in user's permanent room saves its queue and play history (song details and who added each one, but not chat) so they're still there next time. And if somebody reports a lobby, we copy that room as it was at that moment — who was in it, the chat it was holding, and what it was playing and had queued — and keep it with the report, because the lobby is usually gone before anyone can review it. That copy is taken only when a report is made: nothing samples rooms otherwise, and a room nobody reports is never read. It is visible only to administrators reviewing that report.

If you create an account

Accounts are optional. If you create one, we store:

• Your email address, used to sign you in.
• Your password, stored only as a salted scrypt hash, never in readable form.
• Your nickname, @username, bio and, if you upload one, your profile photo. Photos are cropped and resized in your browser before upload, which removes location and other metadata.
• Your saved playlists, who you've invited to collaborate on them, and whether each one is shared by link.
• Your liked songs.
• Your friends and friend requests.
• Your listening history: each song you listened to for at least 15 seconds in a lobby while signed in, when, for how long, the lobby code, and who queued it. It powers your stats, streak and badges. The history itself is visible only to you, and you can clear it at any time.
• Your time zone, taken from your browser, so streak days and badges like Night Owl follow your own clock.
• Your permanent room, if you create one: its code, name, host setting and saved queue.
• A sign-in session, kept in a secure, httpOnly cookie. Only a hash of it is stored on our server, and it expires after 30 days.

Your nickname, @username and photo are visible to people in lobbies you join while signed in. Your profile page (at /u/ and your username) shows your name, photo, bio and any playlists you've chosen to share by link. Unless you turn it off under Account → Badges, it also shows your listening streak and the badges you've earned (for example Night Owl, for listening after midnight), and your streak appears next to your name in lobbies. Badges are worked out from your history but never show the songs themselves. Friends can also see which lobby you're listening in right now. Profiles and shared playlists aren't listed in search engines. You can change any of this, clear your history, or permanently delete your account and everything above, on your Account page.

Searches and links

When you paste a link or search, our server looks it up with YouTube or SoundCloud (and Google's YouTube search suggestions) to get titles and check that the track can be played. Importing a playlist works the same way, and reads the song list from YouTube, SoundCloud or Spotify. When a song plays, our server also asks LRCLIB for its lyrics, sending only the song title, artist and length. These requests come from our server, not your browser, and aren't linked to your identity. Results are cached briefly to reduce repeat requests.

YouTube and SoundCloud players

Music plays through YouTube's and SoundCloud's official embedded players, which load directly from those services in your browser. They may set their own cookies and show their own ads, under the Google privacy policy and the SoundCloud privacy policy.

Security and abuse prevention

To limit abuse, our server briefly keeps IP addresses in memory for rate limiting (for example, how many lobbies or sign-in attempts come from one address). Like most websites, our web server also keeps standard access logs for troubleshooting.

The sign-up and sign-in forms carry a human check from Cloudflare (Turnstile), which is there to stop accounts being created and passwords being guessed automatically. It runs only on those two forms — nowhere else on the site — and to do its job Cloudflare receives your IP address and some signals about your browser. It does not ask you to identify photographs, it is not an advertising product, and it is not used to follow you around. You can read what Cloudflare does with it in their privacy policy.

Administrators

A small number of Music2gether administrators can view and edit accounts and what they contain (profile, playlists, liked songs, friends, room and listening history) to run the service, handle abuse and help people who are locked out. They can't see your password. Administrators have an Admin badge next to their name.

What we don't do

• We don't sell or share your information with advertisers.
• We don't use analytics or tracking scripts.
• We don't record audio, and we don't keep a history of what lobbies played after they close, except for your own signed-in listening history and permanent rooms described above.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update it here and change the date at the top of the page.