1. What this is for
GMI Premium’s community areas exist so that guitarists can talk to each other about playing. Ask questions. Share what you’re working on. Say when something has finally clicked, or when it hasn’t.
The platform is for all guitarists — every genre, every level. A question about barre chords is as welcome as a question about upper structure triads, and neither is more serious than the other.
These guidelines sit alongside our Terms & Conditions. Clause 11 of the Terms sets out acceptable use, and clause 22 explains that you are responsible for what you post. These guidelines explain what that means in practice for a community of musicians.
2. Who can post
You must be 16 or over to use the Service, or have a parent or guardian’s written permission — clause 4 of the Terms.
Accounts are personal to you. Don’t share yours, and don’t post on someone else’s behalf.
3. Copyright — read this bit
This is the section that matters most here, and the one most likely to catch out people acting in good faith.
We are all rights holders. GMI is run by a working guitarist and author. The music you love was made by people who need to be paid for it, the same as you would. That’s the reason for what follows — not a lawyer’s caution.
What you must not post
- Tab or transcriptions of copyright songs. Including tab you worked out yourself. A transcription is a derivative work of the underlying composition — the fact that you did the listening doesn’t make the music yours. This is the rule people most often don’t know.
- Scans or photographs of published notation. Method books, fake books, sheet music, exam syllabus pieces, magazine transcriptions.
- Backing tracks or audio taken from commercial releases.
- Recordings of yourself playing a copyright song, uploaded here. See below for what you can do instead.
- Links to sites whose purpose is unlicensed distribution of any of the above.
What is absolutely fine
- Your own original music, in any form.
- Public domain repertoire — Sor, Giuliani, Bach, traditional tunes, and your own arrangements of them.
- Talking about any music you like, in as much detail as you want. Analysis, chord symbols, “the bridge goes to the relative minor”, “try it as a Drop 2 on the middle four strings” — discussion is not reproduction.
- A few bars to make a point. Writing out a two-bar rhythmic figure or a voicing to answer someone’s question is different from posting a chart.
- Linking to legitimate sources — an artist’s own channel, a licensed streaming service, a publisher’s shop, a licensed lyric or tab site.
- Your own playing — see the next section, which is the important part.
Sharing your own playing — the way to do it
You want to post yourself playing something. Good. Here is how.
Upload it to your own YouTube channel, then embed or link it here.
That’s not a fudge, it’s the genuinely correct route, and it’s worth understanding why. YouTube holds licensing agreements with music publishers and collecting societies covering the compositions people play. We don’t. So a recording of you playing a standard sits on YouTube lawfully in a way it could not sit on our servers. When you embed it here, the video is still coming from YouTube — we’re pointing at it, not hosting it.
A few practical things:
- It has to be your own video, on your own channel. Embedding someone else’s upload doesn’t work the same way, and embedding a pirated one doesn’t make it legitimate.
- If YouTube’s Content ID flags it, don’t panic. A claim usually means the rights holder takes any advertising revenue from that video. It normally stays up and stays watchable. Occasionally a video is blocked in certain countries. That’s between you and the claimant, and it’s ordinary.
Other platforms. The principle is that the host needs to be licensed for the music — and that isn’t the same as the host being big. YouTube’s agreements are the most comprehensive. Facebook and Instagram also hold music licences. Two to be careful with: Vimeo doesn’t carry the same music licensing despite its reputation, and Twitch has a long history of takedowns on saved streams. Both are fine for your own original music or public domain repertoire; neither is a good home for a standard.
Audio only? There’s no clean equivalent of YouTube for audio, and it’s better to say so than to pretend otherwise. SoundCloud is usable but its position on covers is weaker and takedowns happen. Bandcamp is the wrong tool — it’s a sales platform that assumes you hold the rights to what you upload, so putting a cover there without having cleared a mechanical licence yourself breaches Bandcamp’s own terms as well. Spotify and Apple Music aren’t casual uploads at all; they need a distributor and a paid mechanical licence for covers.
The practical answer is slightly inelegant: put the audio on YouTube anyway, over a static image or a waveform, as plenty of players already do. You get the licensing that way.
Public domain repertoire — Sor, Bach, traditional tunes, your own arrangements of them, and a few early jazz standards whose composers died more than seventy years ago — check before assuming — has none of these issues wherever you put it.
One thing that isn’t a sharing route: if you’re a Pro or Founding Member with personal audio storage, that’s private to your account. Nothing you put there is visible to anyone else, by design.
4. Uploads
Images only. JPG, PNG, GIF and WebP. Photos of your instrument, your pedalboard, your practice notes, your callused fingers.
Nothing else can be uploaded to the community — no PDFs, no audio, no documents. This is enforced technically, not just by this rule, and it’s deliberate: it removes the single most common route by which copyright material ends up on a platform like this.
If you’re a Pro or Founding Member, private audio storage for your own practice recordings is a separate feature with its own rules. That is personal to you and is not part of the community.
5. How to treat each other
Musicians argue about music. That’s healthy and we’re not going to stop it.
What isn’t welcome:
- Making it personal rather than musical
- Sneering at anyone’s level, taste, genre or gear
- Harassment, abuse, or targeting an individual
- Anything obscene, threatening, discriminatory or defamatory — clause 11 of the Terms
Nobody here needs to prove they’re serious. Assume the person asking a basic question has a good reason for asking it.
6. Promoting yourself
You’re welcome to mention what you do. If you teach, gig, record or write, say so, and link to it where it’s relevant to the conversation.
What we don’t want is the community used as an advertising channel: repeated promotional posts, unsolicited messages to other members (clause 11), or joining solely to market something.
The test is simple — are you taking part in the conversation, or using it?
7. Reporting something
If you see a post that breaks these guidelines — copyright material, abuse, spam — email info@gmipremium.com with a link to it.
You don’t need to be certain. If something looks wrong, tell us and we’ll look.
We aim to acknowledge within 5 working days and resolve within 20, in line with clause 27 of the Terms. In practice, anything credible involving copyright or abuse gets looked at the same day.
8. What happens when we act
If something has to come down, it comes down. We’ll normally tell the member why.
- First time, honest mistake — we remove the post and explain. Most cases end here.
- Repeated — a formal warning.
- Persistent, or deliberate — suspension or account closure under clause 25 of the Terms.
For copyright specifically, clause 12 of the Terms already reserves the right to terminate the account of anyone who repeatedly infringes, and we will use it.
9. If you own the copyright in something posted here
If you believe material in our community infringes your copyright, our Copyright & Takedown page explains exactly what to send and where. It sets out the requirements from clause 12 of our Terms in full.
We may remove the material while we investigate.
10. What we do and don’t do
We don’t read every post before it appears. Clause 22 of the Terms says this plainly, and it’s how nearly every community works.
What we do is act on what we’re told, promptly, and keep a record of it.
