The deal, in plain English

notch.fm is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Spotify. Spotify has not reviewed it, does not run it and is not responsible for it. The name Spotify and its marks belong to Spotify; they are used here only to say what this app connects to.

What notch.fm is: a place to score, tag and organise the music in your own Spotify account. What it is not: a music service. It has no catalogue, no player and no audio of its own.

Your account, not ours

You sign in through Spotify’s own login with the Spotify account you already have. notch.fm never asks for or sees your Spotify password, and it cannot create, share or lend you an account.

Spotify does the playing

Pressing play in notch.fm sends a command to the Spotify app or web player signed in on one of your devices. Spotify plays the audio, counts the stream and pays the rights holders. Spotify requires Premium for that, so on a free Spotify account the transport controls will not work - that is Spotify’s rule, not a paywall of ours.

Spotify’s terms still apply

Your use of Spotify content is governed by Spotify’s terms and privacy policy, not by this page. Nothing here grants you any right to Spotify’s music, and nothing here can take one away.

You hold the switch

Revoke notch.fm’s access at spotify.com/account/apps at any time and it stops immediately. Spotify can also change or withdraw what third-party apps are permitted to do, without warning either of us, and where that removes a capability the app is meant to say so rather than fake it.

The privacy page lists every piece of Spotify data the app reads and the feature each one exists for, along with the flat commitments: no audio is downloaded or stored, no model is trained on your data, Spotify content is never combined with another music service, and your Spotify tokens never reach the browser or any third party.

• The scores and tags you set are your work. notch.fm stores them so it can answer questions with them; it does not claim ownership of them.
• You can export the lot as JSON at any moment, on any plan, for free. Downgrading from Premium does not delete anything.
• You can delete your account and take everything with it. It is permanent - the privacy page describes exactly what goes and the two things that deliberately stay.
• Songs you liked and playlists you built through notch.fm live in your Spotify account. Deleting your notch.fm account leaves them exactly where they are.

Premium is a subscription to notch.fm’s own features, and only those. It lifts the limits this app imposes on its own product: how many songs you can rate and tag, how many playlists you can keep, whether you can publish them, whether you can post comments, the badge and level track, and how much smart search you get.

It is not a way to buy access to Spotify content. It includes no music, unlocks nothing on Spotify’s side, is not a Spotify subscription and is no substitute for one. Whatever Spotify lets your account do is exactly the same before and after you pay us.

The pricing section on the home page lists what each plan allows, and Settings → Subscription shows what your account is on right now. The exact numbers are not restated here on purpose: the limits the app actually enforces live in one place in the code, and a third copy of them is a third thing to go stale.

Upgrade, downgrade or cancel from Settings whenever you like. Payment is handled by Stripe; card details are never sent to notch.fm and are never stored by it.

Comments, public playlists, profiles and the feed are seen by other people, so the usual applies: no harassment, no hate, no spam, nothing illegal, and do not post other people’s private information.

• Comment text is filtered before it is stored - the app keeps the filtered version and never the raw input.
• Content that breaks the rules can be removed, and an account that keeps breaking them can be suspended.
• Impersonating someone else, or presenting yourself as connected to notch.fm or to Spotify when you are not, is not on.
• Do not use notch.fm to redistribute Spotify content or to try to extract, scrape or resell it. There is nothing in the app that does that, and building something on top of it that does is not on either.

This is a project under active development, run by one person. It is offered as it is:

• There is no uptime guarantee and no support commitment. It can be down, and it can be down while you want it.
• Features can change, move or be withdrawn - the changelog records what has already happened rather than what will.
• Parts of it depend on Spotify’s API, which changes on Spotify’s schedule. Where that removes a capability, the app is meant to say so rather than fake it.
• It is not a backup service. Nothing here should be the only copy of anything you care about, which is exactly why the export button exists and is free.

There is no company behind notch.fm to name: it is an individual project, not a registered entity, and this page does not pretend otherwise by inventing one.

It will, because the app does. The date at the top moves when the content of the page changes, not when the site is redeployed - so a date that has not moved genuinely means nothing has.