How We Build

A statement of principles for TravelStory and Music Is Life.

No feed algorithm

Most platforms optimise for time spent. That single decision explains almost everything people dislike about them: the outrage, the endless scroll, the sense that you're being handled rather than served.

We don't optimise for time spent. We think you should open the app, find what you came for, and leave.

What you follow is what you see.Artists, venues, genres, journeys — you choose, and that choice is honoured. Nothing is injected into your feed because it performed well with people like you. Nothing is withheld because the system thinks you'll stay longer if it holds it back.

Where we do rank things — and why that's different

We're not going to pretend nothing is ever ordered. When you search for venues, something has to come first.

Discovery listings are ordered partly by ratings from the people who actually work with a venue — artists, promoters, and fans. That's a ranking system, and we'd rather say so plainly than hide behind "no algorithms."

The difference is what it optimises for. Our ordering answers "which of these is genuinely good?" It does not answer "which of these will keep this person scrolling?" Ranking that serves you is a feature. Ranking that serves us at your expense is the thing we're refusing to build.

Ratings are private. They're never published as public reviews, never attached to a name, and never used to shame anyone. They exist to push good venues up, not to give anyone a weapon. Every role can rate every other role, because accountability that only runs one direction isn't accountability.

Advertising: what we will and won't do

We're not going to promise we'll never carry advertising. Products need funding, and a promise made at launch that gets quietly reversed two years later is worth less than no promise at all.

What we will do is be specific about where the line is.

What we will never do

• Never interrupt you.No pre-roll, no mid-roll, no ad break before a set or partway through a video. If you're watching something, you watch it.
• Never take over your screen. No full-page interstitials, no modals you have to dismiss, no countdown before a close button appears.
• Never break up content. No ads injected every few paragraphs. No ads dressed up as posts, gigs, or journeys to make you engage with them by mistake.
• Never autoplay at you, and never with sound.
• Never follow you. No tracking pixels, no retargeting, no ads that chase you around the rest of the internet because you looked at something here.
• Never affect rankings. This one matters most. Nobody buys their way up a listing. Advertising sits alongside results, clearly marked, never inside them. What ranks well ranks well on merit, and money cannot move it.

What we might do

Designated banner placements, in fixed positions, that you can see are advertising and can ignore.

That's the whole of it.

The important part: we sell context, not you

If we sell advertising, we sell the context— a drum & bass night in Bristol, a hiking route in the Pyrenees — not the person looking at it.

An advertiser can reach people reading about a genre in a city. They cannot reach you specifically, because we don't build a profile of you to sell access to.

This means:

• We do not profile you for advertising purposes
• We do not share, sell, or broker your personal data with advertisers, data brokers, or ad networks
• Verification data is never involved. Not in targeting, not in segmentation, not in any form
• No third-party tracking is embedded in our apps

The advertising industry's standard model is to learn as much about you as possible and sell that knowledge. We think you can sell a poster site without also selling the people walking past it.

Notifications you control

Reach shouldn't mean interruption.

You choose what you hear about, and how often:

• Follow precisely.Specific artists, specific venues, specific genres, specific journeys. Not categories we've inferred from your behaviour.
• Set your own frequency. Real-time, daily digest, weekly, or nothing at all.
• Quiet hours.We won't wake you.
• Leave easily.Unfollowing and opting out take one tap and work immediately. No retention flows, no "are you sure?", no dark patterns designed to make leaving harder than joining.

We'd rather send you four notifications you're glad to get than forty you learn to ignore.

Verification: tiered, proportionate, and blind to us

Safety on a platform that connects artists, venues, promoters and fans — including at events where under-18s are present — means knowing that people are who they claim to be. It should not mean handing your identity documents to a company you've just met.

So we verify in tiers. The level of checking scales with the level of access and responsibility, not with how much data we'd like to have.

The tiers

• Tier 0 — Browse. No account. Look around freely. We ask for nothing.
• Tier 1 — Account. An email address and a verified contact. Enough to hold an account and be contactable. Nothing more.
• Tier 2 — Age assurance.Required for age-restricted venues, events, and content. This confirms one thing: that you're over the relevant age threshold. It does not tell us your date of birth, your name, or what document you used.
• Tier 3 — Identity verification.Required for anyone with reach or access to others: artists, venues, promoters, and anyone whose account can contact a broad audience or accept bookings. If your account can affect other people, we need to know it's attached to a real, accountable person.
• Tier 4 — Enhanced checks. Required for anyone in a position of responsibility toward under-18s at events. Higher bar, appropriate to the risk.

What happens to your documents

Verification is carried out by Didit, an independent identity verification provider. You upload your document to them, not to us. It is never stored on our systems and no member of our team can view it.

Didit holds SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, and iBeta Level 1 PAD certification. They operate under GDPR and UK GDPR with a published Data Processing Agreement, and their remote verification process has been formally attested by Spain's financial regulators as safer than verifying someone in person.

We ask for the least we can get away with.Each tier requests only the attribute it actually needs. An age check returns whether you're above the threshold — not your date of birth, not your name, not your document number. We don't request what we don't need, because the safest data is data that was never collected.

We keep only the answer. What our systems record against your account is a flag: verified, or not. The verification result is processed and the underlying data discarded immediately — it is never written to our database, and never retained in logs.

We don't leave copies sitting with Didit either.Once we've recorded the result, the verification session is deleted from their systems too.

We want to be precise about one thing, because vague privacy claims are worth nothing. Didit processes this data on our behalf, which means we remain legally responsible for it. This is a commitment we keep through how we've built the system — minimum data requested, nothing retained, sessions purged — not a claim that it would be impossible for us to do otherwise. We think you're owed the accurate version rather than the more flattering one.

What verification is never used for

Verification data is used to establish trust and safety. That is its only purpose.

It is never used for marketing, advertising, profiling, audience segmentation, recommendations, or sold or shared with any third party for any commercial purpose. It does not shape what you see. It does not feed a model. It sits behind a flag on your account and does nothing else.

Safeguarding

Verification establishes who someone is. Safeguarding is what happens afterwards.

• A full-time, vetted moderator. Not volunteers, not crowdsourced reporting, not an automated filter left to run unattended. A paid, accountable person whose job this is.
• Reporting that goes somewhere.Reports are read by a human and actioned. You'll be told what happened.
• Accountability in every direction. Fans can raise concerns about venues. Artists can raise concerns about promoters. Venues can raise concerns about artists. No role is above scrutiny.
• Under-18s are treated as a distinct duty of care, not an edge case in the terms of service.

Reach without exploitation

The obvious objection: if there's no algorithm pushing content, how does anyone get discovered?

Through merit and through connection, which is how it worked before engagement optimisation and how it still works offline.

• Post a gig and the venue and artist appear on it too — it reaches all three audiences, not just yours.
• Good venues rise in listings because the people who play them said so, not because they bought placement.
• Fans find you through genre, location, and date — because they were looking, which makes them worth more than a thousand passive impressions.
• Nobody's reach is throttled to sell it back to them. If a hundred people follow you, a hundred people hear from you.

That last point deserves emphasis. On advertising platforms, organic reach is deliberately suppressed so that reach can be sold. Your own followers are withheld from you and rented back. We don't do that, because we have nothing to sell you.

What this costs us

We'd rather be honest about the trade-offs than pretend there aren't any.

Growth is slower without engagement optimisation. Verification is friction, and some people will stop at the gate. Refusing interruptive advertising and behavioural targeting rules out the most lucrative version of the easiest business model on the internet. A human moderator costs more than an automated filter and is slower than one.

We've accepted all of that. A smaller platform that people trust is worth more — to us and to them — than a larger one that has to keep explaining itself.

Questions about anything here are welcome — see the FAQ or get in touch, and we'll answer specifically rather than pointing you at a policy document.