Privacy notice

Polaris Records Ltd is a music distribution company registered in England (company number 15293821).

Registered office: Suite A, 82 James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Suffolk, England, IP28 7DE.

For any data-protection question — access, deletion, anything you're unsure about — email legal@polarisrecords.net.

The data we hold falls into a few small groups:

• Applicants (anyone submitting through /apply): your name, email, links to your music, any cover art you upload, and any free-text you provide.
• Panel users (label staff and partners with logins): name, email, a hashed password, your two-factor authentication secret, and session metadata.
• Smart-link signups (anyone signing up on a /l/ page to be notified when a release drops): your email address, the listening platform you chose, and your timezone (used to send the release-day email at midnight in your local time). We also store a one-way hash of your IP address and browser user-agent for abuse prevention — those are not reversible.
• Automatically: your IP address (used for rate-limiting and abuse prevention) and basic request logs (path, status, timestamp).

• Applicants: legitimate interest in evaluating submissions, plus your consent for any follow-up communication.
• Panel users: contract — we couldn't run the label without it.
• Smart-link signups: your consent. You give it by submitting the signup form on a smart-link page (where the disclaimer below the form explains what you're agreeing to). You can withdraw consent at any time using the one-click unsubscribe link in any email we send you.
• Logs and IPs: legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and reliable.

Only the partners we genuinely need:

• Resend: transactional email delivery.
• Cloudflare R2: file storage for audio and artwork.
• Downtown Music & Label Services: when a release is delivered, the metadata you supply (track titles, credits, etc.) is passed to them and on to the streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, and so on).

No advertising trackers, no marketing pixels, no third-party analytics.

• Applicant data: 24 months after submission. If we sign you, we keep it for the contract term plus 7 years (UK accounting requirements).
• Smart-link signups: 24 months after the release date, then deleted. If you unsubscribe before then your row is flagged as opted-out immediately and the release-day email won't fire. The row itself is kept (still flagged as opted-out) for 24 months so a re-signup with the same email doesn't silently re-enrol you.
• Audit logs: 24 months.

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access your data, correct it, have it deleted, restrict how we use it, object to processing, receive a portable copy, and complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. To exercise any of these, email legal@polarisrecords.net.

Some of our service providers (notably Cloudflare R2) may store data outside the UK or European Economic Area. Where they do, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses to keep your data protected.

When an artist on our roster releases new music, they sometimes share a smart link — a public page at polarisrecords.net/l/slug where you can sign up to be notified on release day.

If you sign up on one of those pages, here's the deal in plain English:

• We collect your email address and the listening platform you chose (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music).
• We also detect your timezone from your browser so we can send the release-day email at midnight in your local time, not someone else's.
• On release day we send exactly one email with a link to listen on your chosen platform. That's it. We don't use your address for anything else — no newsletter, no marketing, no sharing with third parties.
• Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe link. If you click it, your row is flagged opted-out immediately and we won't email you about that release ever again.
• If you unsubscribe and later sign up to the same release again with the same email, we won't silently re-enrol you — your previous opt-out sticks.
• We never publish your email or share it with the artist. The artist sees an aggregate signup count for their release, not who individually signed up.

We only set strictly-necessary cookies — the session cookie that keeps you logged in. We don't set tracking cookies. We don't use third-party advertising or analytics.