The Musician's Map Effective: September 30, 2026 · Last updated: October 19, 2026
The Musician's Map is operated by The Musician's Map ("we", "us"). This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it. We have tried to write it in plain English rather than legal boilerplate. If anything here is unclear, write to privacy@themusiciansmap.com and we will explain it.
The Musician's Map is built for students applying to music schools, and for the parents and teachers helping them. Many of our users are under 18. We take that seriously, and there is a section below addressed specifically to students and parents.
These describe what we do today. If we ever change any of them, we will tell you before the change takes effect, and where the law requires your consent we will ask for it first.
We may publish or share statistics drawn from how the service is used as a whole — for example, how many students preparing jazz piano auditions shortlisted a particular school in a given year. Figures like these describe groups, never people, and we only publish them where the group is large enough that no individual could be picked out of it. That is different in kind from selling information about you, which we do not do.
We are not paid by schools, universities or anyone else for access to you. The Musician's Map is free during the beta; if we begin charging, we will tell you clearly in advance.
Looking around without an account. You can browse the program list and each school's card before creating an account. We collect nothing for that: no name, no email, no sign-up. The choices you make while looking — student, parent or teacher; tradition and instrument; the schools you add to a list; the filters you set — are kept in your own browser only, so they are there if you come back in the same browser, and they are turned into the start of your account if you create one. They are never sent to us before that. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary technical server logs (the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time), as described under "How long we keep it".
Account information. Your email address and a password. The password is stored only in an encrypted form that we cannot read.
Who is filling in the profile — the student on their own account, or the parent, teacher or counsellor who opened it from theirs. We take this from the account rather than asking it. Also whether the student is under 18 (worked out from the birth date, as above). Together these decide which fields the form asks for and whether a parent needs naming.
Parent or guardian name and email (optional). Optional for every student, under 18 included; a parent or guardian is one entry on the "Parents & teachers" list, and there may be more than one. If a parent or guardian is added, we email them once, in the student's name, to say the account exists, what it is for, and how they can follow the student's list with an account of their own. We do not ask for their phone number or their address.
The student's identity. Legal first and last name — applications need the name on the paperwork — and a preferred first name if they go by something else.
The student's school. The school's name is required for every student. Its address is required only when a teacher or counselor is building the account, because it then stands in for the student's home when we look at what is nearby; otherwise the address is optional and out of the way. A teacher who starts a student's account is not assumed to teach at the student's school — their own school is offered as a suggestion, never filled in for them.
Where the student lives. Country, city, state or province, and postal code. State is the one that does real work today: where a public university publishes separate admission rates for residents and non-residents, we show the one that applies. City and postal code are held for a feature we are building that will show pre-college and summer programs near you. We do not ask for a street address.
Musical details. Whether the student works in the classical, jazz, or contemporary tradition, their instrument and any second instrument, their present grade and the graduation year it implies.
Academic details — no longer asked. Until October 16, 2026 the profile asked for a GPA range and whether the student had taken the SAT or ACT, with the score. It no longer does, and the app does not use them: how competitive a school's admission is comes from the school's published admit rate, not from anything about you. An account that entered a GPA range or a score before that date has it removed from its saved profile the next time the account is opened; nothing reads or shows it in the meantime.
Song suggestions (optional). Whether to lean song suggestions toward songs written for a male voice, a female voice, or neither — the difference between suggesting a song a singer can perform as written and one they cannot. It never filters anything, every song remains choosable, and "no preference" is the default. We do not ask for gender; an earlier version of this profile did, and that answer was converted to this preference and the gender itself discarded the first time the profile was opened after October 5, 2026.
The student's plans. The schools and programs they save, the repertoire they are preparing, how ready they consider themselves on each piece, and notes they write for themselves.
What we collect automatically. Like any website, our servers record basic technical information when you visit: the pages you request, the time, your browser and device type, and your IP address. We use this to keep the service running and to find faults.
Your date of birth — asked, never kept. The sign-up screen asks a student for it, and a parent starting a student's account gives the student's. A parent, teacher or counsellor is not asked their own. It is used once, in your browser, to work out two things: whether the student is at least 13, and whether they are under 18. Only those two answers are saved; the date itself is never sent to us or stored anywhere. The same applies if you answer it again later from your profile.
What we do not ask for. We do not ask for a street address, a phone number, financial information, or any government identification. We do not ask for race or ethnicity, family income, citizenship or immigration status, health information, grades, test scores or a transcript. Some services in this field collect those because schools ask them to; we have no school customers and no reason to. We also do not buy information about you from anyone else.
We use what we collect to give you an account and keep you signed in, to save your schools and repertoire so they are there when you come back, to run and improve the app, to contact you about the service, and to keep the service secure and prevent misuse.
We also look at our own figures in aggregate to understand how the service is being found and used — for example, how many students at a given school have accounts, or how an access code travelled. That is counting, done internally; it does not identify anyone, and it is never shared or sold.
That is the whole list, and the commitments above apply to all of it.
Some state laws now require us to answer this plainly, and it is a fair question in any case. We do not use your personal information to train large language models, and we do not sell or give your personal information to any other company to train its models.
We do expect to build tools of our own that look at what students give us in order to give those students something useful back — feedback on a recorded audition, for example. Anything of that kind would be trained on material submitted to The Musician's Map, used to serve the people who submitted it, and described on this page before we started doing it. Your material does not go to someone else's model.
We use a small number of outside services to run The Musician's Map. Each of them sees only what it needs to do its job, and each is bound by its own agreement with us:
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or if we need to in order to protect someone's safety or enforce our terms. If our business is ever sold or merged, account information may transfer as part of that, and we will tell you before it happens.
We do not create accounts for anyone under 13; the birth date check at sign-up refuses them. After a refusal, that browser tab remembers only that it happened — a yes or no, never the date, and never sent to us — so a second try from the same tab is refused too; it forgets when the tab is closed. If you are 13 or older you accept our Terms of Service and this policy yourself; neither federal law nor Connecticut's requires a parent's permission for a student of 13 to 17, and we do not ask for one. What we do instead is tell a parent or guardian when there is one to tell. If a parent or guardian started your account from their own, they already know, and accepted the terms for their own account when they did. Otherwise — you signed up yourself and added a parent or guardian to your "Parents & teachers" list, or a teacher or counsellor gave us a parent's address when inviting you — we email that parent or guardian once (in your name when you added them, with your note at the top): that you have an account (or that one is being set up for you), who set it up, what the service is and what the account holds, and one link to a page of ours where they can read these terms and this policy and, if they wish, create a free account of their own to follow your schools, deadlines and repertoire (read-only unless you let them edit). The email carries no buttons; the link is written out in full so they can see where it goes. If a teacher or counsellor sent it, it opens with a short note the teacher wrote (or kept) in their own name, and the teacher receives a copy without the link. Nothing is needed from the parent for you to use the account. A parent or guardian who would rather you did not can, from that page, ask us to pause the account — you are then stopped at sign-in with an explanation and can ask them to change their mind — and, in a separate and deliberate step, have the invitation withdrawn or the account deleted entirely. Whatever they choose there, we confirm it to them by email, copying the teacher or counsellor who set the account up if there was one. A parent or guardian can also write to privacy@themusiciansmap.com at any time.
Where a parent or guardian has been named, we hold their name and email, whether they have chosen to follow along, asked for a pause, or not responded, when we last wrote to them, and — where a teacher or counsellor set the account up — the note they wrote to the parent. A parent or guardian may also ask us at any time to show them what we hold about their child, correct it, or delete it entirely. Write to privacy@themusiciansmap.com from an address we can connect to the account, and we will respond.
We only collect what the app needs to be useful, and the list above is the whole of it. Everything we ask a student for is there to do a job in the app — matching them to programs, planning repertoire, or showing how they line up against a school's published figures. We never ask about their health, their family's finances, or anything else unrelated to applying to music school.
Some college-planning services are sold to schools, which hand over student records and receive reports back. The Musician's Map is not one of those. Your account is yours. We have no contract with your school, we receive nothing from them, and we send nothing to them. No teacher, counsellor or administrator can see your account unless you share it with them yourself — see the next section.
If that ever changes — if a school or district becomes a customer of ours — it would bring legal obligations we do not have today, and we would publish a separate policy covering it before enrolling a single student that way.
Your profile has a "Parents & teachers" list: a parent or guardian, a teacher, a college counsellor or anyone else you want to see your plan, as many of them as you like. When you add someone, we record who they are, their email address, and the role you gave them, and we give them a read-only view of your saved schools, your repertoire and your readiness on each piece. We deliberately do not show them your GPA, test scores, song-suggestion preference, home city and postal code, or anyone else's contact details — those are not part of what is shared, whatever the person's role. The state you live in and your school are included, because they decide which admission figures and nearby programs the plan shows.
Access can be read-only or read-and-write, and it is yours to set. Someone who invited you starts with both; someone you invited starts read-only. When a person has editing access, changes they make are saved to your account with a record of who made them, and the fields they cannot see are never touched by their saves. If two of you edit at the same moment the later save is refused rather than allowed to overwrite the earlier one. Each time you change someone's access we leave them a one-line note, shown once, the next time they open your account. If you have told us you are under 18, a parent or guardian you have named keeps at least read access; that rests on what you told us, not on anything we verify.
We send the email for you, in your name — it shows as you "via The Musician's Map", with your own address as the reply-to and you copied — so you never have to leave the app; the note at the top is yours to write or keep, and under it we add how to open your plan (for a parent or guardian, the information described in the previous section and the offer to follow along). The person creates an account with the address you sent it to, or signs in if they already have one; a forwarded link does not work for anyone else. You can remove anyone at any time from the same list, and their access ends the moment you do. Anyone given access agrees to use it only to help you, and not to copy or pass on what they see.
Flags. Once someone on your list has opened your account, either of you can pin a short note to a school or a song — "Flag this for Ms. Keys" on your side, "Flag this for Jack" on theirs — to suggest a program, ask about sheet music, or say anything else about that one thing. We store the note, who wrote it, who it is for, the school or song it is about and when it was written, and we show it to the two of you: on the Home page of the person it is for and on that school's or song's card. You see every flag on your account; a person on your list sees only the flags they wrote or received, never what another person on your list wrote. The person a flag is for can reply to it once; the reply is stored and shown the same way. Either of you can archive a flag; an archived flag is kept, marked archived, until the account is deleted, so that we can look at how flags are used — how many, how often they get a reply, how quickly — never at what they say.
Email preferences. We send no email about your account until you have chosen what you want, and saved the choice. On your Profile page you choose, for each of three kinds of email, whether to get it the moment it arises, in one summary email a week, or not at all: communication from the people on your list (flags on schools, songs and next steps, and replies); deadline reminders and next steps (30, 14, 7 and 1 days before each saved school's application, prescreen and audition dates, as the app has worked them out for you, and — when we build it — changes to a school's published requirements); and notes about changes to The Musician's Map itself, which we write and send by hand only for notable changes, never automatically. Sign-in links, invitations, consent notices and the notes you send yourself are not covered by these choices — they are part of the service you asked for. The choice can be changed at any time, and every such email ends with a link that turns all three off in one step, without signing in. These are service emails; they are not marketing, and we do not send marketing email. For a flag email we hand our email provider the recipient's address, the sender's name and address (as the reply-to), and the note; for a reminder, the school and the date; for a weekly summary, the week's items grouped by student; for an update note, the note. To send reminders we keep, for each school on your list, the dates the app worked out for you, refreshed whenever you use the app, and a record of which reminders have gone. We keep the date your choice was last changed and when your last summary went out.
A parent, guardian, teacher or counsellor can hold an account to invite students and to look at the accounts those students share back. For that account we hold their email, the name they give when they sign up (which students see on their profile), their relationship to the student (Mom, Dad, Guardian, Teacher, Counselor and the like — how we refer to them when we write to the student), and which of those roles they chose. A teacher or counselor also gives a title (Mr., Ms., Mx., Dr. and the like), which is how students see their name, and names their school — or says they are independent and not affiliated with one; the school appears under their name in the invitations they send. They are not asked their date of birth.
To start a student's map they enter a first name and an instrument, and optionally a last name, the student's school, and the student's email; a teacher may also give a parent or guardian's email. A map can be started with no email at all — to look around, or to build a list before the student is involved — in which case nothing is sent, no one else can see it, and the adult adds the email when they are ready to invite (or deletes the map). We send the invitation ourselves, from an address of ours, with the inviting adult's own address as the reply-to so that a reply reaches them and not us. The inviting adult is copied on the student's invitation, and it is sent in their name ("Ms. Keys via The Musician's Map"). A parent or guardian's address, if a teacher or counsellor gave one, is not copied on the student's invitation; instead we write to the parent separately at the same moment — the teacher's own note, then what the service is and the link to the page where they can read the terms and follow along — and hold their response, if any, with the invitation until the student joins. The teacher receives a copy without the link. We hold what the adult entered until the student creates their account, at which point it becomes the start of the student's own profile — theirs to change — and the invitation is closed. The person who invited them can see the student's account on the same read-only terms as any other share, and the student can end that at any time. An invitation that is never accepted can be withdrawn by the person who sent it, and we do not use the names or addresses in unaccepted invitations for anything else.
The Musician's Map is built for students applying to schools in the United States, and our service is intended for users in the United States. Our servers are located in the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your information will be processed here.
We keep your account information for as long as your account exists. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your personal information and your saved work within 30 days, except where we have to keep something to comply with the law. Technical server logs are kept for a short period and then discarded.
You can view and change what you have entered at any time inside the app. You can ask us to delete your account and everything in it by writing to privacy@themusiciansmap.com. You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you. You can stop using the service at any time.
Depending on where you live you may have additional rights — for example, residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and some other states have specific rights to access, correct, delete and obtain a copy of their personal information, and to not be discriminated against for exercising them. We extend these rights to everyone who asks, wherever they live, because it is simpler and fairer than sorting people by address.
Your data is stored on servers operated by the providers named above, protected by encryption in transit and access rules that prevent one user from seeing another user's information. No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise. If we ever discover a breach affecting your information, we will tell you promptly and tell you what we know.
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so in the app and update the date at the top. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it. If you do not, you can close your account.
privacy@themusiciansmap.com
The Musician's Map is operated as a sole proprietorship. We are in the process of forming a limited liability company, and this page will be updated with its name and registered address when that is complete.