spotmp3

Legal

Takedown Policy

This page describes, step by step, what happens when someone asks us to remove something. spotmp3 publishes no library. No page here belongs to a recording. Audio already produced for a visitor can remain in a cache for a while. A request reaches that cache and deletes each identified copy.

Last updated 2026-08-18

Who can submit a request

Copyright owners and their authorised agents may submit. This includes labels, distributors, publishers, law firms and anti-piracy services acting for a named client. An artist who is not sure whether their label has already filed is welcome to write: once we can establish that you hold or represent the right, we will confirm whether the recording is currently subject to a request. We will not name the filer or reveal their correspondence. That information belongs to a third party, and an email alone does not prove identity. Other rights claims, such as trademark claims, go to the same address. The same person reads them, but handles each on its own facts. Personal-data requests are different. Their address and timetable appear in the privacy policy.

What a request must contain

What decides how fast a request is actioned is whether it identifies the work precisely enough to act on without guessing. A useful submission gives us:

  1. The work itself — title and artist, plus the Spotify link or spotify: URI for the track or the release. This service keys records by the id inside that link. Every link form resolves to the same id, so it reaches every cached copy. An ISRC or catalogue number can support the request, but this service does not look up records by either one. An artist name alone is not precise enough.
  2. Where you encountered it, if that is not the link itself — the search text, or what the page showed you. A screenshot is not a substitute for the Spotify link.
  3. The scope you are asking for: one recording, one release, or a list of them. We handle a catalogue-wide request one recording at a time. Send the list, or an artist or label link from which we can draw it. A release published later will need a new request.
  4. Your name, the rights holder you act for, an email address we can reply to, and a postal address and telephone number if you want the request treated as a formal notice.
  5. A statement that you are the owner or are authorised to act for the owner, and that you believe in good faith that the use complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

The elements a copyright notice should carry are also listed on the copyright policy, and either page is a fine place to start from. A request that is missing something is never silently dropped. The reply names what is absent. You can complete the same thread, and the original receipt date stands.

What happens at each stage

  1. You submit. Email support@spotmp3.net with the elements above. There is no autoresponder. A person sends the acknowledgement. A genuinely urgent issue, such as a pre-release leak, can be marked URGENT in the subject line. This helps us triage one inbox; it does not create a second queue.
  2. We review. A person — not a filter — checks the request for completeness and validity, expeditiously and in practice within a few days of receipt.
  3. We act. Where the request is valid, both cache tiers are cleared of the identified recording. This reaches every shared cached copy at once. The cache key uses the recording, format and bitrate, not the visitor or link type. A finished job may still hold its own copy. That job folder is deleted twenty-four hours after the job ends.
  4. We confirm. You receive written confirmation of what was removed and when. If we decline, the reply explains why and says exactly what would make the request actionable — a declined request is a description of the gap, not a refusal to engage.

What is kept afterwards is the correspondence itself: the request, the decision and the date it took effect, in the thread it arrived in. That is what lets an appeal be checked against the original rather than re-argued from scratch. It sits apart from anything the service records about visitors, which the privacy policy covers on its own terms.

How to appeal

If something you rely on was removed and you believe the request behind it was mistaken or abusive, reply to the confirmation email or write to the same address with APPEAL in the subject line. An appeal is checked against the original request rather than re-argued from scratch, and nothing that was deleted is restored while that review runs. What that does not mean is that the recording is unreachable in the meantime: there is no denylist here, so a visitor asking for it can cause it to be produced again — see the last section. Misrepresenting that material is infringing is not costless — in the United States it is actionable under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), which makes the sender liable for the damages and costs the misrepresentation causes — and a request found to be invalid is answered in writing saying so.

What a takedown here can and cannot do

What this service holds is audio it has already produced: a finished file stays in a shared cache on our own disk for about a week, or less when the size cap evicts it, and a copy sits in object storage behind that cache with no expiry of its own, so a popular track is fetched from its source once rather than a thousand times. A job’s own folder is deleted twenty-four hours after the job ends. A takedown clears the cached copies of the identified recording; there is no page to delete, because there was never a page. It does not install a standing refusal — this service keeps no denylist of recordings — so if a recording needs to stay out, say so in the request and it will be handled directly rather than by a mechanism that does not exist.

What it cannot do is reach anything outside this service. It does not remove the recording from Spotify, from the platforms audio is retrieved from, or from any other site, and it cannot recall a file that a visitor already saved to their own device — a notice aimed at those has to go to the party that holds them. It also does not change what a visitor is permitted to do: that is governed by the terms of service and by the copyright law where they are, both of which apply whether or not a request has ever been filed.