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Version 1.0.
Effective September 21, 2026 · Version 1.0
JOYFL is a music platform for independent artists, built and operated by GoForth Foundation, a nonprofit organization. This policy describes what personal information JOYFL collects, why, and what you can do about it.
This is one of four documents that together govern JOYFL:
a JOYFL competition.
If something here conflicts with one of those, the more specific document governs the specific situation it was written for.
Questions about this policy, or about your information specifically, can go to contact@joyfl.music.
Most people who use JOYFL never create an account and never give us any information. You can browse the catalog and listen to music as a guest, without signing up, at any age.
We do not collect any personal information from guest listening. There is no listener account, no listening history, no saved preferences, and no per-play tracking of any kind — not even in anonymized or aggregated form. This isn't a gap we plan to fill later; it's a deliberate design decision.
The one honest exception: the servers and network that deliver JOYFL to your browser — our hosting provider and content delivery network — keep short-lived technical logs (things like IP address and timestamp) the way essentially any website's infrastructure does, for security and reliability. We don't use these logs to build a profile of you, and nothing in JOYFL ties them to an identity. See §9 (Who we work with) for who operates that infrastructure.
See §8 (Cookies and similar technology) for what, if anything, runs in your browser while you listen.
JOYFL offers an email list for people who want updates on the competition — finalists, the winner, the gala. Signing up does not create an account.
If you sign up, we collect:
your age or birthdate — see below).
campaign source and a marketing tag), so we know which outreach is working.
You can unsubscribe at any time, from a link in every email. That link is permanent and doesn't expire — it will always work, even years later.
Artists and JOYFL team members sign in using a magic link sent to your email — there are no passwords on JOYFL, anywhere, for anyone. That's enforced at the database level, not just in the app: an account literally cannot have a password stored against it.
If you have an account, we hold:
location, photo, and links to your other platforms.
and never show on any public page.
browser/device type tied to a login session) — not used to track you around JOYFL, just to keep the sign-in process secure.
Magic-link sign-in codes are stored in a form that can't be read back — even someone with direct database access can't recover a working sign-in link from what's stored.
Entering a JOYFL competition is separate from having an artist account, though it uses the same sign-in.
When you submit an entry, we collect:
finished recording, along with the story behind it, including any personal testimony you choose to share.
to submit the work.
featured vocalists, and similar), along with confirmation that you have their permission to submit on their behalf. See §6 for what this means if you're one of those named people rather than the person submitting.
— there's no public judge portal, and no public voting, scores, or entry counts.
We use this information to run and judge the competition, review eligibility, and keep you updated on your entry's status — JOYFL's standing principle here is that entrants are never left in the dark about where things stand.
What happens to your entry. This policy covers the personal information above. What JOYFL may do with the *submitted work itself* — beyond judging, such as whether and how it may be published, shared, or used afterward — is governed by the competition rules you accept at submission, not by this document.
If an artist submits an entry and lists you as a contributor — a co-writer, a featured performer, someone who gave them permission to use a song — we may hold your name and role even if you've never visited JOYFL or created an account.
We rely on the person submitting to have your permission to do this, and our entry rules require them to confirm that. If you're one of these people and want to ask us about your information, request a correction, or ask that it be removed, you don't need an account to do that — email contact@joyfl.music, or use the artist-profile removal request form, which is open to anyone.
Some of what makes JOYFL's privacy story simple is what we chose not to build, on purpose:
not for guests, and not for artists or admins listening to JOYFL either.
sign-up, the updates list — is a yes/no confirmation, not a birthdate.
password be stored even by mistake.
isn't a privacy control so much as a product choice, but it means there's no public "engagement" data about you to worry about.
If you're signed in as an artist or admin, JOYFL sets one cookie to keep you signed in securely. It isn't present for guests, since guests never sign in.
We aren't currently running analytics or advertising technology on JOYFL. We have an optional page-view counter built in (from our content delivery provider) that is switched off, and which would not use cookies, local storage, or any way of recognizing the same visitor across visits if it were turned on.
If that changes, we'll update this section — and the version number at the top of this document — before it does.
We use a small number of outside services to run JOYFL. None of them are allowed to use your information for their own purposes — they process it only to provide their service to us.
| Who | What they do for us |
|---|---|
| Railway | Hosts JOYFL, including our database and file storage. This is where account, artist, and entry data lives. |
| Resend | Sends our emails — both sign-in links and updates-list emails. |
| Cloudflare | Delivers JOYFL's pages quickly and securely, and provides the optional page-view counter described in §8. |
We don't currently use a payment processor, an advertising network, a CRM, or a support-ticketing vendor.
If you're a guest: nothing about you is public, because we don't collect anything about you.
If you're an artist: your profile — display name, bio, location, photo, and the platform links you add — is public once your profile is approved, unless you turn on unlisted mode. Unlisted profiles and songs can still be reached by a direct link, but won't show up in search or browsing on JOYFL. Your legal name is never shown publicly, under any setting.
Share links don't expire and don't break. If a song or profile is later hidden or removed, the link still works — it leads to a friendly page rather than an error, with a way to find other music. A link never just stops working or throws an error.
Most of JOYFL's records — song versions, rights attestations, and the internal record of who did what and when — are designed to never be edited or deleted outright. If something needs to be corrected, we add a new record that supersedes the old one; the history isn't erased. This is a deliberate integrity choice, not an oversight: it's what lets JOYFL stand behind the provenance of what's in the catalog.
That means a request to "delete my data" doesn't work the same way on JOYFL as it might on a typical app. Here's what actually happens, honestly:
immediately. It stops being shown or found publicly. Depending on the situation, a record that a removal happened may still be kept internally.
overwriting the old one. What's shown to the public reflects the correction; the earlier version stays in our internal history.
something truly unreachable, immediately: an admin can invalidate a song's audio file so that no link to it, anywhere, works anymore.
unsubscribe, that's final.
If you have a request along these lines, email contact@joyfl.music and we'll tell you plainly what we can and can't do for your specific situation.
Anyone, at any age, can listen to JOYFL as a guest — there's no age check on listening at all.
Creating an artist account, entering the competition, or joining the updates list all currently ask you to confirm you're 18 or older, using a simple checkbox. We don't collect a birthdate or verify age beyond that confirmation.
We take reasonable steps to protect the information JOYFL holds, including:
database level.
database access.
No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security. If we ever believe your information has been exposed in a way that puts you at risk, we'll tell you.
GoForth Foundation is a nonprofit organization, and many of the state privacy laws that create specific rights (like California's or Colorado's) are written to apply mainly to for-profit businesses, often with nonprofit exemptions or size thresholds JOYFL doesn't meet. We follow the practices in this policy regardless of where you're located or which specific laws apply, because it's the right way to run JOYFL — not only because a law requires it.
If we make a material change to this policy, we'll update the version and effective date at the top and post a notice on JOYFL. Where we've recorded that you agreed to a specific version of this policy or a related document, we keep track of which version that was.
We'd rather publish an honest current policy and revise it than publish nothing while we get it perfect.
Questions, requests, or concerns about your information: contact@joyfl.music.
If you're not a JOYFL user but believe your information appears in an artist's submission (see §6), the same address reaches us, and you don't need an account to use it.