Jamaican Music Atlas

Our licensing position

The atlas does not pay licensing fees and does not buy content. We are a small documentation project, and every penny that went to licensing would be a record not researched. So we do not make offers we cannot keep, and we do not ask anyone to hand over rights for free either. What we do instead is send people to you.

What a rights holder gets from an entry in the atlas:

Discovery. A researched, credited entry in a reference work people search, browse and cite — sitting alongside the artists, studios and sound systems your work belongs with.
Links straight to you. Your own website, store, label page or streaming profile, linked from the record itself. Traffic goes to your destination, not to a copy of your work on ours.
Plays that count as yours. Where media is embedded, it streams from the platform hosting it — your channel, your player, your numbers. We do not re-upload to capture the audience.
Attribution that travels. Credit and rights state are attached to the media itself, so they stay attached wherever the record appears on the site.

And what it costs you:

No exclusivity. Nothing you send is exclusive to the atlas. Publish, license or sell the same material anywhere else, at any time, without asking us.
No transfer of ownership. Copyright stays exactly where it was. We ask for permission to show something, never for the thing itself.
No resale. We do not sell access to submitted material, sub-license it to third parties, or sell it on as a dataset. If that ever changes it will be by asking you first, not by a quiet edit to this page.

If a paid licence is what you need for your material, we will say so plainly and leave your work out — with no hard feelings and a link to you anyway wherever it is fair to mention the record.

Media the atlas finds and references

Most media on the site was not sent to us. It is material already published elsewhere — a video on an official channel, a scan in a digital archive, a release on a streaming platform — that we reference so a reader can go and hear the thing being described.

It stays where it is. We link or embed from the source; we do not copy audio, video or imagery onto our own servers to serve from there.
Official and rights-aware sources first. Where an artist, estate or label has an official channel, that is the one we point at, in preference to a re-upload.
Every media item carries a rights state, and that state decides what the site does with it — see the table below.
Quotation stays quotation. Lyrics, interview transcripts and archive text appear as sourced excerpts with attribution, in service of the commentary around them.
Machine transcripts are drafts. Automatically generated transcripts are marked as such and reviewed by an editor before they are treated as a source for anything.
Uncertainty is labelled, not smoothed over. Records carry a confidence label — verified, well supported, probable, disputed, community recollection or unverified lead — so a claim is never stronger on the page than it is in the sources.

What each rights state means on the site

Rights state	What the site does
`licensed`, `public_domain`, `creative_commons`	Embedded and playable in the page, credited, streaming from the source platform.
`discovery_only`	Shown as a reference link out to the source. Never embedded, never played on our page.
`unknown`, `permission_requested`, `fair_dealing_review`	Held in editorial review. Treated as restricted until a rights state is recorded.
`restricted`, `expired`, `takedown`	Not shown publicly. A `takedown` item stays out permanently.

The rule behind the table: only licensed, public_domain and creative_commons media is ever embedded on a public page. Everything else is, at most, a link.

If you send us something

Anyone can submit a memory, a correction, a source lead or a media link. Submissions go into a private editorial queue — nothing appears publicly because it was submitted.

What you keep. You keep copyright and every other right you had. The licence below is non-exclusive: it takes nothing away from what you can do with your own material.

What you grant. By submitting, you give the Jamaican Music Atlas a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store your submission, review it, and — if editors accept it — publish and display it on the atlas and in material describing the atlas, with the credit you asked for. That is all it covers. It does not let us sell your material, license it on to anyone else, or claim it as our own.

What you confirm. That you have the right to send us what you are sending — it is yours, or you have permission, or it is genuinely free of restrictions — and that you are telling us honestly which of those it is. If you are not sure, say so in the submission: an uncertain lead we can research is more useful than a confident claim we cannot check.

What you can change your mind about. The licence is revocable. Ask us to take your submission down and we will, on the terms in the next section — you do not need a reason, and it does not have to be a legal claim.

Credit. Be credited under your name, under a credit name of your choosing, or anonymously. You can change how you are credited later. Contact details you give us stay private to you and the editors — they are never published with an entry.

Registered contributors accept these terms as part of the Contributor Agreement, which also covers editorial review, confidence labels and how corrections are handled.

Corrections, takedowns and removal

If something here is wrong, uses your work in a way you did not agree to, or names you in a way you are not comfortable with, tell us. You do not need a lawyer to write to us and you do not need to prove ownership before we will look.

Send it through the contact desk under “Rights & takedowns”, with:

a link to the page or the media item;
what is wrong, or what you hold the rights to;
what you would like to happen — a correction, a credit, a different link, or removal;
a way to reach you.

What we do. We aim to acknowledge every rights request within five working days. Where a claim is clear, or where the material is personal or sensitive, we take the item out of public view while we look rather than leaving it up during the conversation. Removal requests are honoured — an item marked takedown stays out. What we ask in return is the chance to correct a factual error rather than delete the record of it: an entry with a mistake fixed and the source cited serves everyone better than a gap.

Requests about personal information — a name, a photograph, contact details, an account — are handled under the Privacy Policy, and are honoured whether or not there is a copyright question attached.

Talk to us

Rights, licensing, permissions and takedowns: contact the atlas under “Rights & takedowns”, or write to info@jamaicamusicatlas.com. Corrections and source leads are welcome through Contribute, and everything else through the contact desk.