Privacy Policy

We collect information you provide directly to us, such as when you:

• Create an account, or a musician, band or venue profile
• Fill out forms on our website
• Contact us via email
• Use our platform to browse or save musicians
• Request, quote, book or pay for a performance
• Message the other party to a booking, or attach a file to a message
• Review a booking, or open a dispute about one

This information may include your name, email address, location, profile photos, biography, and any other information you choose to provide.

Around a booking, we also collect and store:

• Event details — the date, times, duration, type of event, guest count, your budget, what you asked for, and the venue name and full street address
• Commercial details — the quote, the price, fees, deposit, the cancellation policy that applied, and the payment and payout record
• The agreement record — what you agreed to at checkout, the date and time you agreed, and the IP address you agreed from. We record it because a card issuer asks for exactly this if a payment is ever disputed, and without it we cannot show what you were shown
• Messages and attachments between the parties to a booking, and anything submitted as evidence in a dispute
• Audio, if you choose to speak rather than type — see section 3
• Calendar availability, if you connect a Google or iCal calendar so you are not double-booked

We collect technical information automatically: your IP address, browser type and device, the pages you visit, and similar log data.

We do not receive your card number. Card details are entered on Stripe's own payment page. We see only the last four digits, the card brand and whether the payment succeeded.

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, maintain, and improve our services
• Process transactions and send related information
• Send promotional communications (with your consent)
• Respond to your comments, questions, and requests
• Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities
• Form and run bookings: match requests to acts, hold and release funds, send receipts, reminders and notifications
• Handle cancellations, refunds, disputes and chargebacks, including responding to a card issuer with the record of what was agreed
• Detect and prevent fraud, spam and abuse, and meet our legal, tax and accounting obligations

Booking email — a receipt, a confirmation, a cancellation notice — is transactional and is sent even if you have turned marketing email off. You can turn marketing email off at any time in your settings.

Several features offer to save you typing by drafting something for you. They work by sending what you wrote or said to Google's Gemini API and using what comes back to fill in a form you then check. This is worth stating plainly:

• Describing an event. If you type or speak a description of your event instead of filling in the form, the whole of that text — or an audio recording of your voice — is sent to Google. It normally contains the date, the venue and its address, the kind of event, roughly how many people, and your budget.
• Voice answers and profile writing. If you record an answer or ask us to draft a biography, that audio or text is sent to Google.
• Search, quotes, replies and summaries. Search phrasing, the contents of a booking request, and message text may be sent to Google to draft a quote, suggest a reply or summarise reviews.

Google processes that content to return a result, under the Gemini API terms between Google and MusicGigs. We do not use it to build advertising profiles and we do not sell it.

Every one of these features is optional and skippable. The ordinary form sits beside each of them, does the same job, and sends nothing to Google. If you would rather nothing left our systems, use it — we remember that choice and stop offering the AI route. Please do not put anything into an AI box you would not want a third party to process; there is never a reason to include card numbers, government identifiers or anyone's health details.

AI output is a draft. A person reviews and sends it. AI does not set a price, send a message or decide a dispute.

Booking someone means telling them enough to turn up and play. When you send a request, the act sees your name, your event details and the venue address. When a booking is confirmed, both sides see each other's name and the full booking record.

Email addresses are never exposed to the other party. Mail routes through the platform. A client's phone number is revealed to an act only after the act has replied to them, so an unanswered request never hands out a number. Contact details typed into messages, a request or a quote (phone numbers, email addresses, links and social handles) are hidden until the booking is paid, and shown once it is.

Public profiles, live shows and open mic listings are public by design and visible to anyone, including search engines. A published review is public and shows the reviewer's display name.

We keep your account and profile for as long as your account exists. Deleting your profile removes it from the site.

Booking and payment records are kept even after a profile is deleted. We are required to retain what was charged, what was paid out and what was agreed, for tax, accounting and payment-network purposes, and we may need them to answer a chargeback or a dispute long after an event. Those records are retained for at least seven years and are not deleted on request while that obligation lasts.

You have the right to access, update, or delete your personal information at any time. You can do this through your account settings or by contacting us directly. You can also ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct something, and turn off marketing email.

Depending on where you live — including under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act and comparable state laws — you may also have the right to confirm whether we process your data, to obtain a portable copy, and to appeal if we refuse a request. We do not sell personal data and we do not use it for targeted advertising or profiling that produces legal effects. To exercise any of these, email gregg@musicgigs.org. We will not treat you differently for asking.

Deletion is subject to section 8: we will delete what we can and tell you what we have to keep, and why.