The short version
Some links on this site earn a commission if you buy through them. They cost you nothing extra. They do not change what gets recommended.
What that means in practice
An affiliate link carries a tag identifying this site. If you follow one and buy something, the merchant pays a small percentage of the sale to whoever sent you — in this case, this site. The price you pay is exactly the same as if you had found the product yourself. The commission comes out of the merchant’s margin, not out of your pocket.
This is how the site is paid for. There are no ads, no sponsored articles, no paywall, and nothing that follows you around the internet — see the privacy page for what that adds up to.
Programmes
{{AFFILIATE_PROGRAMMES}}
Where the links actually go
A gear link points at this site before it points at a shop. /go/tuner is an
address here; following it returns a redirect to whichever merchant that
recommendation currently names, and your browser goes there.
That indirection is worth explaining rather than hiding, because it is the sort of thing that looks evasive when discovered and is not:
- A recommendation can be repointed without republishing the site. Stock runs out, commission rates change, a better shop appears. The alternative is editing every page a link appears on.
- Which recommendations get followed is countable. What is counted is the recommendation and the time, and nothing about the person following it — the privacy page says so in the same words.
- The tag is not in the page. It lives in the redirect, which is the only genuinely private thing this site has. Everything else here — the theory, the spelling, the shapes — is public by design.
The redirect is temporary rather than permanent, which is what keeps the first point true, and crawlers are asked not to follow it at all.
How the links are marked
Two ways, both deliberate:
- On the page. The gear section carries a plain-language note saying the links are affiliate links. The FTC and Amazon’s own operating agreement both require the disclosure to be conspicuous, and a line in a footer nobody reads is not conspicuous.
- In the markup. Every affiliate link carries
rel="sponsored", which is how Google is told the relationship is a paid one. It stays there even though the link now points at this site rather than at the shop: the marking is about the relationship, not about the hostname. This is not optional and unmarked paid links can earn a manual ranking penalty — but more to the point, it is the honest way to mark them.
What gets recommended
Only things worth recommending to a student. The list is short on purpose: a tuner, a metronome, a capo, strings. Cheap, useful, and the kind of thing that actually changes how practice goes.
A tool page that turns into a catalogue loses the trust that made anyone read it in the first place, which is a bad trade even measured purely in commission.
Nothing here is a paid placement. No merchant has paid to appear, and none of them has any say over the content of this site. If a recommendation stops being the right one, it gets removed regardless of what it earns.
Questions
The contact page is the place.