Privacy Policy

Effective December 12th, 2011

Welcome to Monstro. Rather than a lengthy legal document we thought it was best to simply state what data we collect and what we do with the data.

What we collect

At the heart of our service is data that we collect through Twitter’s API. When you publicly tweet about music from popular music services, we collect and analyze your tweet along with the data that accompanies your tweet. This data includes anything that is publicly available about you when an anonymous user visits your Twitter profile (for example this one for Monstro), the content of your tweet and possibly your location if you included it with your tweet. We do not collect tweets from protected users or Direct Messages (DMs).

Once we have your tweet, we process it to identify the artist and song you have tweeted about. We further enrich that data with our proprietary metadata about the song and artist (e.g. what genre is this song from, can it be streamed from popular services and what catalogs can it be purchased from.

We collect and store who has tweeted what artist and song. From there we might further analyze the music you have colelctively shared or the music shared by you and the people who follow you or you follow. We use the information to better understand the music you share and possibly to recommend you to other users who might enjoy the music you share. We might also feauture you and the music you share on Monstro or in a tweet.

If you sign up to Monstro we also collect additional information about you including your email address and optionally demographic information such as your birthday. We use your email to tell you about Monstro features and we may ask you to help us with features through surveys. Lastly we might send you charts and information about music that we think you might like.

We don’t have the abilty to tweet on your behalf or send DMs, nor do we want to. We also do not have access to your Twitter credentials, but when you sign up you do grant us read access to your Twitter account, and we do store who you follow. We use this to understand the music being shared amongst you and your followers.

We track traffic on our website through a cookie and javascript. If you are a registered user, we associate your login with this tracking info. We use this information to better understand our audience, to improve Monstro features, and we may test feature designs to see what performs best. We also track search terms that bring users into our page and may use that information to drive more traffic to our site.

Lastly we track the number of views, previews, reshares and purchases a song gets

How we make money

We earn affiliate revenue (~5%) on purchases made as a result of clicking through our site to Amazon or iTunes. We also make affiliate revenue if you sign up to a premium plan at Rdio as a result of clicking through our site. More details on Rdio’s affiliate program is available at Rdio’s Developer site.

At some point, we plan to add advertising to the site to select partners. We also plan to offer analytical data to artists, rightholders and other interested parties. We will update this page with further detail on the analytic data as we have more specific.

Keeping your information secure

We’ve used security, encryption and controls to keep your personal information safe and secure. If that information is ever compromised, we will let you know.

If you have a question

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.