What we keep, and why

Reading the archive

You can read every public page without an account. We do not run advertising, and we have not added an analytics or advertising script of our own to these pages. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, as any web host does.

Two things on the site are served by other companies, and your browser contacts them directly. Where we show a video from YouTube, the still picture you see first is loaded from YouTube, so YouTube receives your request for that picture when the page opens. Nothing plays until you press play; when you do, the video loads through YouTube’s privacy-enhanced address, which does not set its usual viewing cookies unless you play something. Signing in and account security are handled by our hosting and database provider. Both companies may keep their own records of those requests under their own privacy policies, which we do not control.

If you make an account

An account stores your email address, a display name if you set one, and the things you choose to do while signed in: items you save, comments and memories you post, and any notifications waiting for you. Sign-in is handled by our hosting platform's authentication service. You can write to us at any time to have your account and everything attached to it deleted.

Following musicians inside the archive has been retired. Any musicians you followed before remain recorded privately in your account and are not used for anything, not shown to anyone else, and never passed to a newsletter or to any outside platform. Ask us and we will delete them.

If you send us something

When you send a correction, a recording link, a verification request or an offer to help maintain a page, we store your name, your email address, what you wrote, and any evidence you attach. None of that is public. Your email address is used to reply to you and to let you check your submission with the reference we give you.

Nothing you send is published by sending it. An editor reads it first. If part of it is published — a corrected date, a credited photograph — only the content appears, never your contact details, unless you have asked to be publicly credited as someone who helps maintain a page.

Photograph submissions are not open yet. When they open, files will be stored privately until an editor approves them, and location and camera metadata is removed from any version shown publicly.

Email

The archive sends email automatically when something happens on your submission or your account. That includes confirming that we received a contribution, asking a follow-up question, telling you the outcome of a review, messages about a verification or stewardship request. Our editors also receive automatic notices when something new arrives for review, which name the submission and the person who sent it.

We do not send marketing email, and we do not pass your address to anyone else for their own use. Mail is delivered by a third-party email service acting for us; it needs your address and the message in order to deliver it, and it keeps its own delivery records. We have turned off open and click tracking, so we do not record whether you opened a message or which links you followed. We keep our own log of which messages were attempted and whether they were accepted for delivery.

People written about in the archive

Pages about musicians are written from published sources, which are listed on each page. If you are the person described, or their family or representative, and something is wrong, out of date or should not be here, tell us and we will look at it properly.

Asking for something to be removed

Write to deekshant@indianmusicarchive.org or use the rights concern form. We record every request, along with each page the material appears on, and reply.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the change will be described here rather than made quietly.