Privacy notice

This notice explains how personal information is handled in The Advance, a show, advance and crew management service for music venues. The Advance is a product of DOMISSOUND.Co (DOMISSOUNDCO LTD, registered address c/o Accountability, 45 Market Street, Hoylake, Wirral, CH47 2BQ, England, company number 11345848) — “we” in this notice.

Who is responsible for your information

Venues that use The Advance decide what information goes into it about their shows, crew and artists. For that information the venue is the controller and we are its processor: we hold and process it on the venue's instructions. If you are an engineer, tour manager or promoter, the venue you work with is your first point of contact about your data.

We are the controller for our own records: requests to join, venue account details, feedback sent to us, this website, and keeping the service secure.

What we hold

• Venue staff: name, email address, the venues you belong to and your role. For venues that pay, their plan, subscription status and next payment date, and the billing email given to Stripe.
• Engineers and crew: name, email, mobile number, roles and skills you enter, the days you mark as available, shows you prefer, shifts offered and worked, rates set by each venue, technical reports and invoices you submit, and an emergency contact if you choose to give one (seen only by the venues you work for, so they can call someone if you're hurt or taken ill at work). From an invoice we keep a scrambled fingerprint of the bank account and its last four digits, so a venue is warned if the account you're paid into changes.
• Shadows, students and tutors: for people who shadow crew to learn, including students placed by an education partner: name, email, phone, course, the shows requested and worked, attendance and hours. For under-18s, date of birth and an emergency contact, so the venue can look after them and send them home on time. Tutors' name, email and phone. Engineers on the show can write feedback that is sent to the student's tutor, and a separate note for the venue on how the shadow got on. That note is only shown to the venue's admins; the shadow and their tutor don't see it in The Advance, but it is included if they ask the venue for a copy of their data.
• Artists, tour managers and promoters: name, email, phone and role; the advance details you give (arrival, vehicles, set lengths, show reps) and files you upload or email such as specs, riders and promotional material.
• Emails about a show: emails sent or copied to a show's own address (see below), with who sent them, who they were to, the text and any attachments.
• Emailed reports and invoices: ticket sales reports a venue has sent to its reports address, and invoices emailed to its invoices address, with the sender's email address and whether our mail server could confirm it really came from them.
• Email activity: whether an email we send on a venue's behalf has been opened or a link in it clicked, so venues can see an advance has been read.
• Requests to join: the name, email and role of the person asking, and the venue details they give us (rooms, capacity, how they work today).
• Feedback: what you write when you use the Feedback button, with your name, email, the page you were on and your browser type.
• Technical data: sign-in records and server logs used to run and secure the service, error reports (the page and what went wrong, so we can fix it), and cookieless, aggregated page-view statistics.

Why we use it

• To provide the service a venue has signed up for: shows, advances, rotas, shift offers, reminders, technical reports and invoice matching.
• To send emails on a venue's behalf: sign-in links, shift offers and confirmations, advances and follow-ups.
• To keep the emails about a show together with the show, and to update ticket sales figures from a venue's reports.
• To protect venues and engineers from invoice fraud: checking emailed invoices really came from the sender, and flagging changed bank details.
• To keep the service secure and working, to stop automated abuse of our forms, and to answer support requests and feedback.
• To review requests to join and set up new venues.

Where we act for a venue, the venue is responsible for having a lawful basis. For our own records we rely on performing our contract with the venue and on our legitimate interest in running a secure, reliable service.

Phone numbers

An engineer's mobile number is visible to the venues they work for. It only appears to other crew on show advances if the engineer turns on “Share my number” in their profile.

Emails about a show

Each show has its own email address. Emails a venue sends about the show copy it in and ask replies to go to it as well as to the venue, so replies, and any thread people keep it copied in on, are filed with the show for the venue's staff. Attachments are saved to the show's files.

Only the venue's staff can read a show's emails; crew, bands and promoters can't see them in The Advance. An email from someone who isn't on the show is held until the venue keeps or deletes it. If the venue has AI reading turned on, emails from people on the show are read to suggest updates (for example a new arrival time); nothing changes until someone at the venue applies it. Venues can delete any email from a show.

Tech specs shared between venues

When a band plays several venues that use The Advance, the tech specs and stage plots they send one venue can be offered to the next, so they don't have to send them again. Only those two kinds of document are shared, never riders, contracts, deal details, contact details or emails. It only happens between venues that have both chosen to share in their settings, and a venue can turn it off at any time.

Promoters and calendars

A venue can give a promoter's or hirer's staff a sign-in that shows the shows under that promoter's name at the venue, with their status and whether the band's advance is in. Ticket sales are only shown if the venue allows it. Engineers can add their booked shifts to their own calendar with a private link, which they can reset at any time to stop the old one working.

Venue integrations

A venue can turn on API access so its own systems (for example its website or ticketing) can read its show listings. This can include the names and positions of crew on a show, but never email addresses, phone numbers, rates or band contact details.

Who we share it with

We use these providers to run the service. They process data on our instructions under contracts that protect it:

• Vercel — hosting, file storage and page statistics
• Neon — database
• Resend — sending email
• Krystal — the mailbox that receives emailed invoices, ticket reports and emails about shows
• Cloudflare — the “are you human?” check on sign-in and sign-up forms
• Stripe — subscription payments. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach The Advance.
• Anthropic — AI reading of specs, riders, timings, invoices, ticket reports and emails about shows, to summarise them and suggest updates, only where a venue has this turned on. Anthropic doesn't use this data to train its models.

Some providers may process data outside the UK. Where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement / Addendum. We never sell personal data and don't use it for advertising.

How long we keep it

We keep a venue's data for as long as it uses The Advance, and delete it within 90 days of the venue leaving unless the venue asks us to keep or return it. Venues may need to keep invoices and related records for longer to meet their own legal obligations. Within that, some things are deleted automatically:

• Emails sent through The Advance, and emails received about a show: after 2 years (files filed from them stay with the show).
• The mailbox copy of emails we receive: 14 days after they've been processed. What was filed stays in The Advance as described here.
• Emails to a show's address from an unknown sender that the venue doesn't keep: after 90 days.
• Students who haven't had a shadow shift or request at a venue for 18 months: their placement records and details there.
• The activity feed: after 12 months. Error reports: after 90 days.
• Names on a show's guest list: the day after the show closes. Only the totals are kept.
• Requests to join and feedback: 12 months after they've been dealt with, or sooner on request.
• Sign-in links expire after 30 minutes and are deleted the next day; expired sign-ins are deleted. Server logs are kept for a short period.
• Personal links in advance emails work once and stop working the day after the show; they're deleted a few weeks later.

Security

Everything is sent over encrypted connections. Sign-in uses one-time links rather than passwords, and sign-in links and API keys are stored only in scrambled (hashed) form. Uploaded and emailed files are private, checked to be the kind of file they claim to be, and only opened through The Advance after checking you're allowed to see them. Each venue can only see its own data, apart from the shared tech specs described above.

Cookies

We only set cookies that are needed to keep you signed in. Page statistics are collected without cookies. The “are you human?” check on our forms may set a cookie that is strictly needed for that check. We don't use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your information, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to or restrict how it's used, and ask for it in a portable format. Crew can download a copy of their information at any time from their profile (Download my data), and a venue's admins can download everything the venue holds from Settings. For information a venue holds about you, contact the venue — or email us at hello@theadvance.co.uk and we'll pass your request on. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

We'll update this page if anything changes and show the date at the top.