Pop Boll Shake

A friendly, plain-English agreement for lending your music to Pop Boll. Version 4, 11 November 2026. It updates four details of version 3 (10 November 2026): the pipeline's tools, self-hosting, deletion times and corpus size. It replaces every earlier version. If you agreed to an earlier version, you keep those terms until you tell me you would rather have these.

Hi! I'm Graham Smith, and I run Pop Boll. If you let me ingest and transcode your music (your "corpus"), the tiny virtual bands inside Pop Boll can study it and be inspired by it when they write their own songs.

Where this is going, honestly

Right now Pop Boll is a fun idea that thinks it might become a viable commercial platform. I am looking at a Kickstarter for the hardware. I am not interested in scaling a huge hardware business, so if this takes off, I will want your help, and I will pay you as much money as it takes. Until it takes off, nobody is getting paid, including me. Everything below is written so that it holds either way.

What happens to your music

I transcode your recordings into MIDI "simulacra" with an offline pipeline that runs on my own computers and private cloud servers. The pipeline uses four published, pretrained neural networks as tools, the way you would use a tuner: htdemucs separates the stems, and three more (a piano transcription network, CREPE and basic-pitch) track pitch and transcribe. None of them is ever trained or tuned on your music.
What "study" means, exactly. Pop Boll's musicians and judges are rule-based programs built on music theory. They are not a generative AI model. There is no neural network trained on your music, no weights, no model file. When a musician studies a track, it extracts and keeps short pieces of musical information: one-bar rhythm patterns, interval shapes, velocity arcs and chord sequences, plus corpus-wide statistics such as typical tempos, keys and song shapes. Those notes live in the corpus's "DNA" file and in each musician's study log, and they can ride along when musicians move between Pop Boll devices. They are fragments of musical knowledge, never your recordings and never a whole part.
The bands write new songs from music theory and those notes. They do not replay your music. Pop Boll is designed so that new songs do not reproduce your parts note for note, and I treat any song that does as a bug: tell me, and I will fix it and pull the song.
Your corpus and music will never be used to train an AI model, by me or by anyone acting for me, and I never send it to third-party AI services.
Listeners cannot download the simulacra. The system is hardened against people trying.
Your files are kept in private, access-controlled storage, with a signed archive copy, so I can prove where everything came from and what you agreed to.

Choose one: what Pop Boll keeps

☐ Full: Pop Boll may also store your recordings and stream them, as they are, to Pop Boll's paid supporters in its "CORPUS" listening mode.
☐ MIDI-only: Pop Boll keeps only the transcriptions and study notes. Your recordings are deleted after transcoding and are never stored or played.

Choose one: where your recordings live

☐ Send them to me. Upload them, or give me a place to download them (glad to pay on Bandcamp).
☐ I host them myself at: ______________________________ . Pop Boll pulls from your server, transcodes for free, and keeps only what your choice above allows. (The automatic pull is still being built; until it is, I do the same steps by hand.) If your server goes away, your corpus is hidden from every Pop Boll after 7 days of failed check-ins, and it stays hidden until you tell me it is back. Nothing is deleted by a hide. The how-to is "Hosting your own Pop Boll corpus" (popboll.com/hosting-your-own-corpus).

Who gets to hear it (Full only)

"Authorized Pop Boll players" means Pop Boll's own web players and any physical Pop Boll device, including devices other people build to the open Pop Boll hardware specification, as long as the device runs a genuine, unmodified Bollawax image and is on Pop Boll's allowlist (candles.txt). Your recordings stream only to paid supporters on those players. The MIDI-only choice streams nothing to anyone.

The fine print, kept short

You own it, you keep it. You confirm you own or control the rights to what you send me, or have permission from whoever does. Nothing here transfers your copyright. This is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free permission under the choices you ticked above. It covers Pop Boll's commercial use within those choices: devices sold, Kickstarter rewards, paid supporters. You stay free to do anything else you like with your music.
Credit. Pop Boll credits your corpus by the name you give me, unless you would rather it did not.
Either of us can end it, any time. I can remove your corpus whenever I want, or whenever you ask. On removal I stop using it for new songs at once, and every player and device drops it within minutes. I delete your recordings and transcriptions from Pop Boll's storage within 7 days, and the locked archive copy within 30 days (archive copies are locked for 30 days, so that part cannot be instant). Songs the bands already wrote are new works and stay with whoever has them; if you ask, I will take your name off them.
Money. See "Where this is going" above. If Pop Boll makes real money from corpora, I will work out fair payment with you in good faith before anything changes, and you will hear it from me first.
Your details. I keep your legal name, your email address and the record of what you agreed to, as evidence of this permission. I do not use them for anything else.
No promises beyond these. Pop Boll is provided as is. Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect losses. If anything here ever needs to change, I will ask you first, and you can keep the version you agreed to.

Sound good? Email this document from your personal email address to shake@bollawax.org with a "Sounds good to me!" or whatever you like in it (be nice: do not leave the subject or the body blank!). Say which two boxes you ticked. If I am downloading, include details about your corpus and where I can get it. If you are hosting, include the address of your folder; the login goes through the Pop Boll backstage, never by email. A corpus needs to be multiple albums' worth for now. Smaller corpora are something I would like to support one day; there is no date yet, and I will tell you when there is. Beyond that it can be any size: a flat or subfoldered folder of MP3s or WAVs is perfect (FLAC, AIFF and M4A work too).

Thanks! Graham & the Pop Boll Guild

SIGN IF YOU REALLY WANT TO BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO, JUST EMAIL

Your name: ______________________ Corpus name: ______________________

Signature: ______________________ Date: ______________

Earlier versions are not kept on this site. If you agreed to one and would like a copy, email me at shake@bollawax.org.