Terms of use and commissioning: horror film scores

1What these terms cover

These terms are between you and Zazie Productions LLC, the studio behind this site and the composer Zazie Kanwar-Torge. They govern your use of horror.zazieproductions.com, including the catalogue at /store, and they govern the commissioning of original music and sound from the studio where you and the studio have not signed a separate agreement.

Reading this page does not create a project, a booking or an obligation on either side. A project exists once a quote has been accepted and a deposit received, or once an agreement is signed.

Related documents: the privacy notice, licensing, rights and credits, and purchases, delivery and returns. Where those documents are more specific, they fill in these terms rather than contradict them.

2Order of precedence

Where two sources say different things, this order decides:

1. A signed composer agreement, deal memo or long form contract for the project, including the production's own music agreement where the studio has signed it.
2. A written quote or scope confirmation sent by the studio and accepted by you in writing.
3. These terms and the related documents above.
4. Any other content on this site, including rate summaries and marketing copy.

If your production's standard music agreement conflicts with these terms, send it before work starts. The studio signs production paper routinely and would rather redline in week one than argue in week eight.

3Using this site

You may view, print and share pages from this site for your own reference and for internal evaluation of a possible collaboration. Press and festival use of credited stills and quotes is welcome; a copy of the coverage afterwards is appreciated.

You may not:

• Republish, rehost or mirror the showreel audio, film samples, posters or press photography without written permission.
• Use any music from this site, including showreel cues and catalogue previews, synchronised to picture in a finished work, a festival cut, a trailer or anything otherwise public, without a licence.
• Scrape, mirror or bulk download the site in a way that harms its availability, or remove attribution from material you are permitted to use.
• Use the site, or the studio's name, to imply an endorsement or a business relationship that does not exist.

Automated indexing by search engines is permitted and encouraged. See robots.txt for the crawl policy.

4Ownership of site material

The compositions, recordings, artwork, photography, text and this site's design are owned by Zazie Productions LLC or licensed to it, and are protected by copyright and related rights. Nothing on this site is placed in the public domain, and nothing on this site transfers rights to you except as clause 10 and the licensing page provide.

Film titles, credits and third party names belong to their owners. Where a project appears on this site, it appears with the production's knowledge, and any request to remove or amend a credit will be actioned.

5Commissioning a score

A project begins when you send an inquiry and the studio replies with a written quote covering scope, deliverables, schedule and fee. A quote is open for 14 days unless it says otherwise. Accepting it by email, and paying the deposit, books the slot; until then the window is unreserved and may be given to another production.

The quote records the runtime, cue count or an estimate of it, the production tier, the delivery date and the deliverables. If your picture changes shape in a way that affects any of those, clause 7 applies.

The studio is a single composer and takes a limited number of concurrent projects. It may decline any inquiry, including for schedule, subject matter or fit, without giving a reason.

6Fees and payment

Fees are quoted net in United States dollars. The studio default is a 50 percent deposit to book the slot and the balance on delivery of the final stems; a different split can be agreed in writing before work starts.

Invoices are due within 14 days of issue. If an invoice is more than 14 days overdue the studio may pause work and withhold delivery until the balance is settled, and the delivery date moves by at least the length of the pause. A project unpaid for 30 days may be treated as cancelled under clause 9.

Fees do not include taxes, duties or withholding. If your jurisdiction requires withholding, that is your obligation, and the studio will complete the forms your accounts department needs. Live player fees, session costs, travel, music preparation and any third party licensing are separate lines where they apply.

7Scope, revisions and change orders

The included revision allowance is the studio default: two rounds of notes per cue during composition and one consolidation pass after the full score is delivered. A round means one collected set of notes delivered at one time.

Any of the following is a change order, quoted in writing before the work is done:

• Revisions beyond the included allowance.
• New cues, or new versions of existing cues, requested after the spotting session.
• Recomposition or re editing caused by a picture change after the agreed lock.
• Additional deliverables: immersive or surround mixes, an album master, source cues, sound design, additional stems or alternate versions.
• Compression of the agreed schedule.

A small trim inside an existing cue is usually absorbed as a courtesy and the studio will say so. What is not acceptable is a moving target with a fixed date: if the picture keeps changing, the schedule changes with it.

8Delivery and acceptance

Delivery is electronic, by download link or file transfer, in the formats named in the quote. The standard delivery is a stereo full mix, stems by instrumental family, the agreed alternate mixes, an MP3 reference set and a cue sheet, at 24-bit WAV and 48 kHz unless the project specifies otherwise.

You have 10 business days from delivery to raise a defect, meaning something that does not match the quote or the agreed cue sheet. After that window the delivery is deemed accepted. Deemed acceptance does not affect your rights over a genuine defect that could not reasonably have been found in the window, and it does not affect any statutory rights you have that cannot be excluded.

Files are retained by the studio for the period set out in the privacy notice. After that, retrieval of session data is not guaranteed, so ask for what you need while the project is live.

9Cancellation, pause and kill fee

Either side may end a project in writing. If you end it:

• Before work starts, the deposit is refunded in full.
• After work starts, the deposit is retained, and any delivered or in progress work beyond what the deposit covers is invoiced at the agreed rate, pro rata to the cues completed.
• Material written for the project stays with the studio and may be reused, unless your agreement says otherwise.

If the studio ends a project for reasons within its control, any fee paid for undelivered work is refunded, and the material written to that point is delivered to you on payment of the corresponding share, so the production is not left with nothing.

A paused project holds its slot for 30 days. After that the schedule is rebuilt around the capacity available at the time, which may not be the window you had.

10Rights in the commissioned score

The grant, its scope, the alternatives and the detail on performing rights are set out in licensing, rights and credits, which forms part of these terms. In summary, and as a default that is always negotiable before a quote is issued: on payment in full, the copyright in the commissioned score transfers to you for the picture and its versions, in all media and territories, in perpetuity; the composer retains the writer's share of public performance royalties, his performing rights organisation affiliation, the right to be credited, and the right to use excerpts for portfolio, reel and press; and the pre existing materials and custom instruments the studio owns are licensed into the deliverables rather than assigned.

Rights transfer on payment, not before. Until the balance is settled the studio retains ownership of the delivered material and licences it to you for internal review and festival submission only.

A commercial soundtrack album release of the score is not included and requires a separate agreement.

11Credit and portfolio use

You will credit the composer in the end crawl of the picture as Music by Zazie Kanwar-Torge and in press and festival material as agreed. The wording variants, including IMDb and poster forms, are on the licensing page. Credit is a material term, not a courtesy: it is how a composer's next project gets found.

The studio may list the project in its portfolio, showreel, press kit and award submissions, using excerpts and stills, once the picture has premiered or been released. Where a project is under embargo, say so and the material stays dark until you lift it.

12What you warrant

You warrant that you own or control the picture you are asking to be scored, that you have the right to supply it and any reference material with it, and that the studio's work as instructed will not infringe a third party's rights.

Where you supply material for use in the score, including temp music, source music, dialogue, samples, lyrics or recordings of any kind, you warrant that it is cleared for that use and you indemnify the studio under clause 20. The studio will not clear third party material on your behalf unless that is agreed in writing as a separate service.

You will not instruct the studio to create anything unlawful, defamatory or infringing, and the studio may decline or stop work on material it reasonably believes to be so.

13Unsolicited material

The studio develops its own projects. To protect both sides, material sent without an invitation will not be reviewed beyond identifying the sender, will be deleted, and creates no obligation of confidence, no obligation to consider it and no relationship between us. The studio remains free to develop any idea, project or material it has already created or creates independently, and you agree that no compensation is owed for material sent this way.

14Confidentiality

Unreleased material is treated as confidential by default, whether or not a document is signed. Cuts, scripts, storyboards, casting and release plans are not discussed, screened or reused, and project files are held on encrypted storage with access limited to the composer and, where a project needs it, a hired session player or engineer under the same obligation.

A mutual non disclosure agreement is available on request and can be signed before any material moves. Confidentiality does not apply to information that is public, that you authorise in writing, or that must be disclosed by law, in which case the studio will tell you first where it lawfully can.

Confidentiality survives the end of a project for as long as the material stays unreleased.

15Catalogue and third party marketplaces

This site takes no payment. Every item in the catalogue links to the marketplace that hosts its listing, and that marketplace runs the checkout, collects the money, handles tax and delivers the goods: Bandcamp, itch.io, Gumroad and eBay.

Your contract for that purchase is with the marketplace as well as with the studio as seller, and the marketplace's terms govern the transaction, its payment processing, its refunds process and its dispute resolution. The studio is not responsible for a marketplace's outage, its fees, its account handling or its conduct, and it cannot see or reverse transactions processed on one.

Prices and stock shown in the catalogue are a snapshot taken on the date stamped on that page. The listing on the marketplace is the current price. Delivery, returns and the licence attached to a purchase are covered in purchases, delivery and returns.

16Embedded services and external links

Film samples are hosted on third party platforms and their players load only when you press play; one sample's cover frame is fetched from its host when the page loads. Cover art in the catalogue is fetched from each marketplace's own image server. External links leave this site, and the studio does not control those destinations or their content.

The privacy notice lists each host, what it receives when it is contacted and when that happens.

17Machine learning and synthetic media

No commissioned cue is composed by a generative model, and the studio warrants that the delivered music is original human composition. Signal processing, synthesis and sampling tools are used as instruments, which is not the same thing.

The default grant does not licence the score, its stems or its session data for use in training a machine learning model, and the studio asks for that restriction to remain in any production agreement. The studio's position on its own catalogue is set out in licensing, rights and credits.

18Warranty disclaimer

This site and its content are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non infringement. The studio does not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error free, and it is not responsible for the conduct of any marketplace, platform or host described on it.

For commissioned work, the studio warrants that the music will be original, that it will be composed with reasonable skill and care, and that it will be delivered in the agreed format by the agreed date, subject to your side of the schedule. No warranty is given that a score will achieve a particular commercial result, festival outcome or audience response.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits a warranty, remedy or right that cannot lawfully be excluded, including statutory rights you may have as a consumer in your own jurisdiction.

19Limitation of liability

Neither side is liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost production time, loss of anticipated savings or loss of opportunity, arising out of these terms or a project.

The studio's total liability for a project is capped at the fees actually paid by you for that project, or the fees payable under the quote where nothing has been paid. The cap does not apply to a breach of clause 14 (confidentiality), to the indemnity in clause 20, to fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, to death or personal injury caused by negligence, or to anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

The same limits apply in your favour as in the studio's. This is a mutual clause, not a shield.

20Indemnity

You indemnify the studio against third party claims arising from material you supplied, from your instructions, or from your use of the delivered music beyond the grant, including the reasonable legal costs of defending such a claim. The studio indemnifies you against third party claims that the delivered music, as composed and as used within the grant, infringes a copyright in a musical work, subject to the exclusions in clause 18 and to the studio's right to control the defence.

The side seeking indemnity must notify the other promptly, hand over control of the defence, and not settle without consent.

21Force majeure

Neither side is in breach for a delay caused by something genuinely outside its control: illness, bereavement, fire, flood, power or connectivity failure, hardware failure, war, civil disruption or an act of a public authority. The affected side tells the other as soon as it can and the schedule moves by the length of the delay.

Where a delay runs past 30 days, either side may end the project and clause 9 decides what is paid and what is delivered. The studio keeps redundant backups of active project data precisely so that a hardware failure does not become a force majeure, and it will restore from backup before it invokes this clause.

22Term and termination

These terms apply from the moment you use the site, and to a project from the moment a quote is accepted until the project is delivered, paid for and its surviving clauses have run their course.

Clauses 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23 and 25 survive the end of a project or of these terms. The studio may suspend access to a project or refuse further work where an invoice is overdue, where clause 12 is breached, or where continuing would require the studio to do something unlawful.

23Governing law and disputes

These terms and any project under them are governed by the law of the state in which Zazie Productions LLC is organised, without regard to its conflict of law rules, except where your local law gives you rights that cannot be contracted out of, in which case those rights are unaffected.

Before either side starts a proceeding, it will give the other written notice of the dispute and 30 days to resolve it in good faith. Most disagreements on a score are about the film and resolve in a spotting session; the studio would rather fix the cue than the record.

Subject to that, the courts of the state in which Zazie Productions LLC is organised have jurisdiction. Nothing here prevents either side from seeking urgent injunctive relief to stop misuse of copyright or confidential material. There is no arbitration clause and no class action waiver in these terms.

24Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. The effective date at the top of this page changes when they do, and the current version is always the one published here.

A change applies to site use from the moment it is published. It does not alter a project already quoted: that project keeps the terms and figures it was quoted under, unless you and the studio agree otherwise in writing.

25Notices and contact

Notices under these terms, and every other message, go to zaziediya@gmail.com. Email is the studio's record: a phone call is a conversation, an email is an agreement.

Copyright and takedown notices should quote the page or work concerned and be sent to the same address, marked for attention. The studio responds to valid notices and removes material it does not have the right to publish. It also expects a notice to be made in good faith.