Secret Sound Echo — Terms of Service
Effective date: September 18, 2026
REVIEW NOTICE. Draft for attorney review, not legal advice. Refund policy, liability caps, and dispute clause need counsel's sign-off for your state. The copyright complaint procedure in §4 needs counsel's sign-off too — in particular whether to register a DMCA agent, which is what makes the safe harbour available.
These terms govern secretsoundecho.com and Secret Sound Echo events, operated by Clear Ear Corp, d/b/a Secret Sound Echo ("Secret Sound," "we"). Using the site or attending our events means you accept them.
1. Accounts
Give accurate information and keep your login to yourself. You're responsible for activity on your account. We may suspend accounts for abuse, fraud, or violations of these terms. You must be 13 or older to hold an account; individual events may set a higher age limit.
2. Purchases
Prices are in USD. Payment is processed by Stripe; we never store card numbers.
Digital music. Sold at listed prices or name-your-price above the stated minimum. Delivered to your account/download link on payment. Digital sales are final except where law requires otherwise or the file is defective — write us and we'll fix it.
Vinyl and physical goods. Limited, numbered runs as described at purchase. Pre-orders state an estimated ship window; delays happen in pressing and we'll keep you posted. Damaged or defective items are replaced — contact us with photos within 14 days of delivery. Shipping charges are stated at checkout.
Vinyl comp code. Vinyl purchases may include a numbered, single-use entry code for a Secret Sound Friday. It's claimed at payment, admits one, is subject to venue capacity and scheduling, has no cash value, and can't be resold.
Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge instead of contacting us, we may cancel the order, void any entry code issued with it, and suspend the account. Write to us first — most problems are a five-minute fix.
3. Events
Entry prices, capacity, and age policy are set per event. We and the venue may refuse or remove anyone for harassment, threats, intoxication, or unsafe behavior, without refund.
Events are recorded — cameras, audio, photography. By attending, and under the Content Use Agreement you accept when you make your profile, recordings that include you may be used in Secret Sound media as described there and in the Privacy Policy. Performers' rights are governed by that agreement and by any separately signed agreement.
4. Your content
You own what you write, perform, and upload. By submitting it through the platform you grant Secret Sound the licence set out in the Content Use Agreement you accept when you make your profile (and, for features, the separate Feature Agreement) — non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, with credit. Don't submit anything you don't have rights to, anything unlawful, or anything targeting another person for abuse. We may remove content at our discretion.
We do not sell your work, we do not licence it to anyone else to sell, we do not give it to a sponsor as their advertisement, and we do not train artificial intelligence models on it or permit anyone else to.
Applications submitted through the site are reviewed at our discretion. Submitting is not a booking, and we don't guarantee a response. Applications are private and are not published.
Responses to a night's Secret — what you write in the room during an event — are private: visible to you and our staff, never shown to other attendees. We publish one only under the consent you gave, with credit.
Rights in what you upload
When you upload anything to Secret Sound Echo — audio, video, or writing, to your profile, a prompt, or a session — you confirm that:
- It is your own original work, or you have permission from everyone who holds rights in it
- It includes no samples, beats, recordings, images, or writing you don't have the right to use
- Publishing it here doesn't breach any agreement you've made with anyone else
Footage you upload. If you upload video or photographs you shot at a night, you confirm you recorded them yourself. Do not upload someone else's recording as your own.
You're responsible for your uploads. If a rights claim arises from something you posted, that's on you, and you cover us against it on the terms in §10.
Reporting
Every piece of work on the site carries a way to report it. We review reports and may remove anything at our discretion — including work that isn't unlawful but doesn't belong here. Reporting is not the copyright procedure below; if the complaint is about copyright, use that.
Copyright complaints
If you believe something here infringes your copyright, write to hello@secretsoundecho.com with: what was infringed, where it is on our site (the URL), your contact details, a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorized, and a statement under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate and you're the rights holder or authorized to act for them.
We remove or disable infringing material when a valid notice arrives, and we terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
If your work was removed and you believe that was wrong, write to the same address with: what was removed and where it was, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe it was removed by mistake or misidentification, and your contact details. We pass a counter-notice to the person who complained, and we may restore the material unless they tell us they have started a court action.
5. Where your work appears
Where your work goes depends on where you put it, and the interface says so before you post.
Your profile catalog
Your profile holds work you add yourself, separate from the Writers Block and writing sessions: up to 5 audio pieces, 5 videos, and 10 written pieces, within a storage limit we publish on the upload screen. These are public, searchable, and yours to edit, reorder, or take down at any time.
Catalog uploads go up immediately — we don't review them first. That is why reporting matters (§4), and why the confirmations in "Rights in what you upload" are recorded with each piece.
Thought prompts
Work you post to a thought prompt is published on the site under your name and is searchable. Work from someone who has stood in one of our rooms goes up straight away; everyone else's waits for a curator. A curator runs the Writers Block and nothing else — they hold no other access to the site.
Writing sessions
During a session your entry is readable only by you and that session's curator. When the session closes, everything submitted is revealed at once and stays as a permanent record of that room. A draft you never submit is never published. After a reveal you may take your piece off the session page at any time, without giving a reason. Publishing it to your profile is a separate, deliberate act and is yours alone to make.
What you say in a room's feed or a session's chat is visible to the people in it, and a curator may hide a line.
6. Season pages and share links
Selected features appear on a public season page: portrait, credited role, bio, and the material our team has marked public — with poems and songs shown as excerpts, not in full. Each feature gets a personal link to their own section, whose social preview carries their name and portrait, meant to be shared. What we may publish, for how long, and what a feature is paid is governed by their signed Feature Agreement, not by these Terms and not by the Content Use Agreement. The Feature Agreement is a separate, individually signed document; accepting the Content Use Agreement neither creates it, modifies it, nor stands in for it. A feature can ask us to remove a published item from their block at any time.
7. Our content
The Secret Sound Echo name, marks, logos, site design, and our recordings are ours. Artists retain their underlying works. Don't scrape the site, rip the streams, reuse our marks, or republish our recordings without written permission. Streaming links go to third-party platforms with their own terms.
8. Payments to artists
Artist pools, splits, statements, and payouts are governed by the signed agreements between Secret Sound and each artist — not by these Terms.
9. Electronic agreements
Where we ask you to sign something — a Feature Agreement, for example — typing your name and submitting the form through a link we sent you counts as your signature. We record the name typed, the time, your IP address, the version, and a copy of the exact text shown to you. Ask and we'll send you a copy of anything you signed.
Accepting the Content Use Agreement works the same way: ticking the box when you make your profile is your acceptance, and we record the version, the date and time, and the IP address. If we change that agreement in a way that affects what you have allowed, we ask you to accept the new version once, the next time you sign in — we do not treat continued use as acceptance of it.
Confirming your rights in an upload works the same way: ticking the box on the upload screen is your confirmation, and we record it with the piece — the version of the wording shown to you, the date and time.
10. Disclaimers and liability
The site and events are provided "as is." To the fullest extent law allows, we're not liable for indirect or consequential damages, and our total liability for any claim is capped at the greater of $100 or what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that can't legally be limited.
You indemnify us against claims arising from content you submit in violation of §4.
11. Disputes
Illinois law governs. Before any formal action, both sides talk in good faith for 30 days. Then: the state courts of Cook County, Illinois.
12. Changes
We may update these terms; material changes get posted with a new effective date, and continued use means acceptance. If any clause is unenforceable, the rest stands.
Contact: hello@secretsoundecho.com · Clear Ear Corp, d/b/a Secret Sound Echo · Chicago, Illinois