tl;dr
We collect almost nothing, we sell exactly nothing, your remixes belong to you, and the samples are tiny, transformed, and non-commercial. If you're a lawyer: hi! There's a section just for you at the bottom.
what we collect (it's embarrassingly little)
- Your email address. Login links go there. It's never shown publicly, never shared, and never used for a newsletter, because we don't have one.
- Your chef profile. Display name, optional picture, optional bio, optional website, optional country. Everything except the email is public, because that's what a profile is for. The country only ever appears as an anonymous chef hat floating near your homeland on the map — never your name, never a pin on your house.
- Your comments. Public, posted under your chef name, pinned to the exact second of the track you were listening to. That's a feature, not surveillance.
- Your battle clock. When you download an ingredients pack, we record which pack and when, so the site can do the two-hours math. It's an honor system with a stopwatch.
- Boring server logs. The web server keeps standard access logs (IP addresses, timestamps) for a short while, like every web server since 1993. We look at them when something breaks, which is more often than we'd like.
Play and download counts are aggregate — the site counts that a track was played, not who played it. We genuinely cannot tell you who listened to your remix at 3 a.m. We like it that way.
what we don't do
- No ads. No ad networks. No "partners."
- No analytics, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting. We don't even run Google Analytics, which in 2026 is practically an act of civil disobedience.
- No selling, renting, or "sharing with select third parties" of anything about you. There is no CRM. There is barely a spreadsheet.
- No AI training on your remixes. Your weird noises remain your weird noises.
cookies & localStorage
One session cookie when you log in (so you stay logged in) and one localStorage key that remembers whether you prefer the dark kitchen, the light kitchen, or — heaven help you — pizza mode. Delete them any time; the site will shrug and carry on.
where your bits live
The site runs on a shared server at DreamHost. Audio and images live on Amazon S3. Login emails travel through email servers, as email does. That is the entire supply chain — no ad-tech constellation, no seventeen-vendor data-processing addendum.
your data, your call
You can edit or blank your profile any time. Want your account and everything attached to it gone? Email us (address below) and we'll delete it — actually delete it, not "deactivate it and keep everything forever" delete it.
your remixes are yours
Let's be extremely clear, because rights-grabs are the industry standard and we are not the industry:
Iron Chef of Music claims no ownership — none, zero, 0% — of anything you upload. Your remix is your work and your copyright.
By uploading, you grant ICOM a non-exclusive, royalty-free permission to host your remix, stream it on the site, and include it in the ICOM podcast feed — in other words, the things a remix site has to do for a remix to exist here. That permission ends where the purpose ends: we will not sell your track, license it to an ad, or sync it to a car commercial. If you delete your remix, the permission leaves with it (episodes people already downloaded from the podcast are beyond anyone's recall — that's how podcasts work).
We encourage — but do not require — chefs to share their remixes under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, in the spirit of the whole enterprise: sample, transform, pass it on. Unless a chef says otherwise on their remix, assume "ask first."
about the samples (the fair-use part)
Every battle starts from one short source sample. ICOM is built on micro-sampling: small fragments, radically transformed, in two hours, for zero dollars. We believe — with a straight face and some case law — that this is fair use:
- Transformative. The entire point of the exercise is to make something unrecognizably new. If your remix sounds like the source, you're doing it wrong and the other chefs will mock you.
- De minimis. The fragments are tiny. Blink and you'll miss the sample; that's the sport.
- Non-commercial. Nothing here is sold. No winners, remember? Also, no money.
- No market harm. A two-hour noise collage is not a substitute for anyone's record. Nobody has ever skipped buying an album because of us. Nobody has ever bought one because of us, either. It's very freeing.
takedowns (the olive branch)
If you hold rights to something you heard here and you object, don't lawyer up — email icom@abject.dev with a link to the track and who you are. If the complaint is legitimate, it comes down fast. We're remixers, not martyrs.
the not-lawyers part
This page was written by musicians, in plain language, on purpose. It describes our honest practice; it is not a forty-page terms-of-service with an arbitration clause hiding in section 23(f). If any of this must someday be interpreted by an actual court: the plain meaning above is the intent. Effective July 2026 — if we change it, we'll change this page and won't pretend we didn't.