Terms of use

What Longwave is

A website that plays background music. Some of it is recorded music we host under an open licence; some is made in your browser as you listen. Listening is free, requires no account, and is not limited by time, track count or session.

We may change, add or retire channels, tracks and features. We try not to break things people rely on, but this is a service, not a product you have bought a fixed copy of.

The music, and what you may do with it

The recorded catalogue is by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The generated channels are released under CC0 1.0. The credits page lists every track and its licence.

Those licences run from the rights holder to you directly; we do not narrow them. What that means in practice:

• You may listen, privately or in a public space, including a commercial one.
• If you reuse a CC BY track anywhere else, you must credit the composer as the licence requires. The wording is on the credits page.
• The CC0 generated audio needs no attribution at all.
• You may not present Longwave itself, its catalogue as assembled here, or its code, design or branding as your own.

The site's own code, design and name are ours and are not covered by those music licences.

Acceptable use

• Do not attempt to break, overload, copy wholesale, or gain unauthorised access to the service.
• Do not remove or obscure the attribution the music licence requires.
• Do not use the service to do anything unlawful where you are.

We may suspend access that damages the service or the people using it.

Availability, warranties and liability

The service is provided as it is, free of charge. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we may take it down for maintenance. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under consumer-protection law that applies to you regardless of what a contract says.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability for any claim is limited to whatever you have paid us in the twelve months before it — which, while Longwave is free to use, is nothing.

Accounts

Listening never needs an account. You need one only to generate music, because the credits generation spends belong to an account. You must be at least 16 to open one, keep your sign-in details to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else is using them. You can delete your account at any time from the account panel; that removes your tracks, your credits and your history for good. We keep a pseudonymous record of payments and credit movements for as long as tax law requires, with nothing in it that identifies you once the account is gone.

Music you generate

When you generate a track, a third-party model renders audio from your description on our instructions, and we deliver the result to you. Between you and us, the result is yours. On the free plan it is licensed to you for personal listening; on a paid plan you may also use it commercially — in videos, podcasts, games, streams and productions of your own. You may not present a generated track as the work of a named human artist, register it with a collecting society as such, or use it to train a model.

You are responsible for what you type. Do not describe music by naming a living or recently deceased artist, a song title, or lyrics that belong to someone else; the provider refuses such requests and we refund the credits. Generation is a best-effort service: a track that fails to render, or that fails our quality checks, is not delivered and its credits are returned automatically. We do not guarantee that a track will match your description, only that it will be the length you ordered and technically sound.

Credits, plans and payments

One credit generates one minute of music. Credits come in two kinds. Plan credits arrive with each billing period of a subscription and lapse, unused, at the end of that period or when the subscription ends. Purchased credits are bought outright and never expire. When you generate, plan credits are spent first. The price of any generation is shown before you confirm it, and a generation that fails or is cancelled before it starts refunds what it cost.

Subscriptions renew automatically each period until cancelled. You can change or cancel your plan at any time from the billing portal; a cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period, which you keep using until then. Upgrading grants the difference in monthly credits at once; downgrading takes effect at the next renewal. If a renewal payment fails we keep your plan active while the card issuer retries; if payment cannot be taken the subscription ends and any remaining plan credits lapse.

Payments are processed by Stripe under their own terms; your card details go to them and never to us. Prices are shown in the currency of the page and exclude tax unless stated; tax is calculated at checkout from your billing address. As a consumer in the EU you have a fourteen-day right to withdraw from a purchase, except that by choosing to generate music you ask us to begin performance at once and accept that the credits used for a delivered track are not refundable. Credits you have not used remain refundable within those fourteen days; write to us. We may change prices; a change to a subscription price applies from your next renewal and you will be told at least thirty days before.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes will be announced on this page with a new date. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version.

Longwave is free, and nothing is for sale today. There are no accounts, no subscriptions and no payments. If any of that is ever added, these terms will be rewritten to cover it — and payments would be handled by Stripe, under their own terms, with your card details going to them and never to us — before anything is offered for sale.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of Spain, and disputes will be heard by the Spanish courts.

If you are a consumer, that does not take anything away from you: you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of the country where you live, and where the law of that country gives you the right to bring proceedings in your own local courts, you keep that right too.

See also the Privacy page, which forms part of these terms.