Terms of use

sym.presar.io is a platform where artists submit their work to a call from a presenter, such as a festival, and where the presenter's jury and, for some calls, the public listen to that work. It is operated by 18131643 Canada Inc., Montréal, which does business as sym.presar.io. These terms are between you, the account holder, and sym. The presenter's own call rules apply on top of them. How we handle your personal information is in the privacy policy, which is a separate page.

One account per person. You sign in with a link sent to your email address, or a password if you set one. An act you create can carry a stage name and members. By creating it you confirm that you may act for them. What is done from your account is yours to answer for, so do not share your sign-in link.

sym takes no ownership of anything you upload or write. We do not sell it. We use it for the calls you enter and for the reporting set out below. We build no ranking of artists across calls and no catalogue of our own. The presenter receives your submission once you submit it.

Before a submission goes in, you confirm on the consent screen:

• that you own the master recordings of the tracks you chose, or that in your answers to the call's questions you have said that someone else owns them or that you are not sure;
• that you have the right to submit the musical works those recordings contain. Being a member of SOCAN or another performing rights society is no obstacle. The licences sym needs from the societies for the public round are sym's to obtain and pay for;
• that you grant the licence set out below.

You answer for the accuracy of the act's name, members and identifiers. Unreleased recordings are welcome on the same terms.

By submitting, you grant sym and the presenter of the call a licence that is non-exclusive, worldwide and free of charge, for the duration of the call and the presenter's retention period, to:

• store the files you upload and make the technical copies needed to stream them;
• play your tracks and show your images to the presenter's jury and staff inside their review workspace;
• for the tracks you chose, once you have agreed to public listening on the consent screen and subject to the section on labels, play them to listeners in random sets during the call's public round, with your stage name and your images.

That is all. No other use is permitted by this licence, and nothing here transfers a right. If you withdraw a submission, the licence ends with it, apart from the records the privacy policy says remain.

Public listening is part of considering your application for a live booking. It is not a music service. The first public round will open in January 2027. These rules will hold for every call that has a public round:

• Listeners will hear random sets drawn from the call's submissions, with at most three tracks per artist.
• Listeners will not be able to choose, search for or replay a track, and nothing can be downloaded.
• Listeners will be able to pause. They will be able to pass on a track only after 60 seconds of listening, and the number of passes per session will be capped.
• Votes will inform the presenter. The presenter decides.
• Every play will be logged, so that royalties can be reported and paid.

If you name a label or another owner for your recordings, your tracks will play to the jury only until the owner confirms to sym in writing that they may play in public listening. sym or the presenter will write to the owner at the address you give. The owner can withdraw that confirmation, which returns the tracks to the jury only. The jury hears the tracks either way.

If you answer that you are not sure, or give no address for the owner, your tracks will play to the jury only until the ownership is settled with us in writing at holla@presar.io.

sym will report the public round to Re:Sound under its Tariff 8 and pay the fees it sets. Every month once the public round has begun, we will report the plays and the tracks played, with artist, title and ISRC, to Re:Sound, and we may share the same list with SOCAN and with Panorama to clear the rights in the recordings and the works. Those societies pay performers, makers, songwriters and publishers from these reports.

sym pays no royalty to you directly and earns nothing from listening. To receive what the public round generates, register your recordings and works with your societies, with an ISRC for each recording, and use the same ISRC here.

The call is the presenter's. Its questions, dates, fees, decisions and programme are its own. An application fee, where a call charges one, goes to the presenter, not to sym, and the presenter's refund rules apply. sym decides nothing about who is programmed.

You can withdraw a submission from a call still open at any time, from your status page. The presenter will stop seeing its content in its workspace at once, and its tracks will not play in public listening. What remains afterwards is set out in the privacy policy. After the call closes, write to holla@presar.io.

• Submitting a work you do not have the right to submit, or saying you own a recording you do not own.
• Presenting yourself as someone else, or an act as yours when it is not.
• Trying to influence a public round by other means than listening and voting: several accounts, automated listening, or arrangements to vote for a submission.
• Recording, capturing or redistributing what is streamed.

The presenter can refuse a submission that breaks these rules, and we can close an account that breaks them.

sym provides the platform as it is, without a promise that it is never interrupted or free of errors. sym is not responsible for the presenter's decisions. If a claim arises because a confirmation you made under these terms was untrue, you answer for that claim.

These terms are governed by the laws of Québec and of Canada, and any dispute goes to the courts of the judicial district of Montréal. The French and English versions say the same thing. If they differ, the French version applies.

A change appears on this page as a new version with its date. The current version is the date at the top of this page.