Terms of service
These are the rules for using Wasanii United — the website, the members app, the artist pages we host and the emails we send. They are written to be read. By creating an account or placing an order you agree to them; if you don't agree, please don't use the platform.
1 · What Wasanii United is
Wasanii United Ltd ("Wasanii United", "we") runs a marketplace where clients and agencies book Kenyan creators — musicians, producers, dancers, photographers and others — and where creators publish a page, sell their music and merch, and write to the people who follow them. We are the platform: we hold the money in escrow, host the pages, deliver the emails and step in when a deal goes wrong. We are not a party to the booking itself. The creator delivers the work; the client pays for it; the agreement about what the work is, is between them.
2 · Accounts
- You must be at least eighteen and able to enter a contract under Kenyan law. Agencies and companies must be entitled to act for the organisation they name.
- You choose a role when you register — creator, client or agency — and it decides what you can do. Roles are recorded with our sign-in provider and checked on every action; you can't grant yourself one.
- Give us a real name and a working email address. Disposable addresses are refused. Keep your password to yourself; what happens under your sign-in is yours.
- One person, one account. If we close an account for breaking these terms, opening another to get around it is itself a breach.
- You can delete your account from the members app. Section 8 of the privacy policy says what we keep afterwards and why.
3 · Bookings and escrow
A booking on Wasanii United goes through fixed stages, and the money moves only when the stage says it may.
- Offer. A client describes the work and a fee. The creator accepts or declines. Nothing is owed yet.
- Escrow funded. The client pays the full fee into escrow. From this point the creator knows the money exists, and the client knows it can't be taken until the work is delivered.
- Delivered. The creator marks the work delivered. A review window of 48 hours opens.
- Released. Escrow pays out to the creator when both sides approve, or automatically when the review window closes with no dispute raised. Neither side can release escrow alone.
Once escrow is funded, cancelling is a dispute (section 5), not a button. Taking a deal off the platform to avoid escrow — swapping numbers to "sort it directly" — removes every protection described here and is a breach for both parties.
Payouts to creators go by M-Pesa to the number on the account, usually within one working day of release. Payments in come by M-Pesa, card or bank transfer through our payment providers; we never see card numbers.
4 · Fees
| What | Fee | Who pays it |
|---|---|---|
| A booking | 5% of the agreed fee | Deducted from the payout to the creator at release. The client pays the fee they agreed, no more. |
| Music, video and stems sold from an artist's page | 5% of the price | Deducted from the artist's share. |
| Merch the artist stocks themselves | 5% of the price | Deducted from the artist's share. |
| The Wasanii United merch range, bought through an artist's page | — | The artist earns 15% of the order; we make and ship the product. |
| Accounts, pages, mailing lists, press kits, messaging | Free | — |
Fees are shown before you confirm anything and are recorded on each transaction. If a dispute ends in a full refund, our fee is refunded too. We will give at least thirty days' notice by email before changing a fee, and a change never applies to a booking already funded.
5 · Disputes
Either side of a funded booking may raise one escalation per gig. Raising it freezes the escrow and puts the booking in front of a Wasanii United administrator, who reads both sides — privately, if evidence is needed — and closes the case with one of: release the fee to the creator, refund the client in full, split it between work done and work not done, adjust the fee and let the booking continue, or hold while more is gathered. Once a case is closed, that side's only remaining channel on that gig is a message to the administrator.
Our decision is made in good faith on what both sides show us, and both sides agree to accept it as the resolution of the escrow. It does not stop either party pursuing the other in court or through mediation over the underlying work; it settles only where the money in escrow goes.
6 · Music, video and merch
- You must own what you sell. Uploading a track, video, stems or a photograph is your statement that you hold the rights to it — including any samples, features and artwork — and that selling it here breaks no agreement you have with a label, publisher or collaborator. We remove content on a credible rights complaint and may close accounts that repeat it.
- Buyers get a personal licence. Buying a track gives you the right to download and listen to it for your own use, for as long as the platform exists. It does not give you the right to resell, redistribute, sync, sample or broadcast it. The artist keeps every other right.
- Previews. Anyone can hear the first thirty seconds. Full playback needs a purchase.
- Prices are set by the artist, in Kenyan shillings, and are what you see at the moment you pay. Digital purchases are final once the file has been made available to you; a file that will not play is our problem to fix or refund.
- Merch you stock yourself is your product: you describe it truthfully, you ship it, you handle returns, and you are the seller of record. Orders and payments still run through our escrow ledger, so a buyer who never receives an item can dispute it. The Wasanii United range is ours to make, ship and stand behind.
7 · Artist pages and press kits
Your artist page is yours to publish or take down. Until you publish, only you can see it. What you publish is public: search engines will index it and anyone can share the address. Keep your contact details on it accurate, because bookings and mailing-list emails point people there. The press kit you generate is a document for you to send on; it carries our name only as the platform that produced it.
8 · Mailing lists
For subscribers: you join a list only by saying yes on that artist's page, and you can leave any list in one click from the footer of any email, without signing in. We never give an artist your address.
For artists: your list is people who asked to hear from you about your work, and nothing else. You may not sell, rent or share it (you can't — you never see the addresses), use it for a third party's promotion, send more than one email a day and three a week, or send anything that section 9 forbids. The header and footer of every email are ours and carry the unsubscribe; you don't get to remove them. Emails are delivered from a Wasanii United account with your name on them and replies come to you; you are responsible for the words. A list whose emails draw complaints or unsubscribes at a rate we consider unhealthy may be paused while we talk to you.
9 · Conduct
Don't use Wasanii United to:
- take payment and not deliver, or accept a delivery and not pay;
- move a deal off the platform to avoid escrow or fees;
- threaten, harass, abuse or discriminate against anyone, or post content that does;
- upload anything you don't have the right to, or anything unlawful in Kenya;
- impersonate anyone, or misrepresent who you act for;
- send unsolicited messages, or use collaboration asks and mailing lists as a spam channel — an ask must contain the work, not just the words;
- probe, scrape, overload or interfere with the platform, or try to act with permissions you weren't given. Every action is authorised on our servers; attempting to bypass that is a breach and may be a crime.
10 · Warnings and closing an account
Anyone you have actually dealt with on the platform can report you, once per pair, for the reasons listed in the app. Reports are read by our trust team; a report that is upheld becomes a warning. Three warnings close the account. Separately, when reports come from a large enough share of a person's own counterparties — currently 30%, from at least three different people — a case opens automatically for review. Either path ends with a human decision, recorded in an audit log, and we tell you the outcome. Escrow already funded is still resolved under section 5 even when an account is closed; money is never kept because of a ban.
We may also suspend or close an account without a report for a clear breach of section 9, for fraud, or where the law requires it.
11 · Your content, our platform
Everything you upload or write stays yours. You give us a licence to store it, show it where you asked us to show it (your page, a store, an email you sent), make previews and thumbnails of it, and keep the copies the law or a dispute requires. That licence ends when you remove the content or delete your account, except for what section 8 of the privacy policy says we must keep, and except that buyers keep access to what they bought.
The platform itself — the code, the design, the Wasanii United name and mark, and the merch range we make — is ours. Your artist page may use our mark only where the platform puts it.
12 · Liability
We provide the platform with care, and we hold escrowed money exactly as these terms describe. We do not guarantee that a creator will deliver, that a client will be pleasant, that a page will bring bookings, that an email will be opened, or that the service will never be interrupted. To the extent Kenyan law allows, our total liability to you for anything arising out of the platform is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect losses such as lost bookings or lost profit. Nothing here limits liability we cannot limit by law, including for fraud or for money you paid into escrow, which we account for in full.
You agree to cover us for claims by others that arise from content you uploaded without the right to, or from your breach of these terms.
13 · Law and changes
These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya, and the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction, without taking away your right to raise a consumer complaint with the Competition Authority of Kenya or a data complaint with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. When these terms change in a way that matters, we update the date at the top and tell members by email or in the app at least fourteen days before the change takes effect; continuing to use the platform after that is acceptance. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands.