How this site is funded
The short version: we earn a commission when you buy through a link here, at no extra cost to you, and it does not change what we recommend.
Last updated
The FTC disclosure
Reed & Rosin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
When you click a product link on this site and buy something, we receive a percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket.
Which links earn us money
Every product link on this site routes through /go, a redirect on our own domain that sends you to the retailer. Those links are marked #ad and carry the rel="sponsored nofollow" attribute that search engines expect.
Links to our own pages, and links to sources we cite, earn us nothing.
| Retailer | Do we earn? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Yes | Associates tag reedandrosin-20. 3% musical instruments, 4.5% physical books |
| Sweetwater | No | We have not joined this program. Any link to them is a plain, untracked link and earns us nothing. |
| Guitar Center | No | We have not joined this program. Any link to them is a plain, untracked link and earns us nothing. |
| Music & Arts | No | We have not joined this program. Any link to them is a plain, untracked link and earns us nothing. |
| Shar Music | No | We have not joined this program. Any link to them is a plain, untracked link and earns us nothing. |
Amazon is currently the only retailer we earn from. That is the normal state of a new site: no other network has approved this brand yet, and we will not wire tracking for a program we have not joined.
The conflict we want to name rather than bury
We earn on purchases and nothing on rentals
Our rent-vs-buy pages recommend renting whenever the arithmetic says to — which for a first-year band instrument is often. We earn nothing at all when you rent.
We publish those pages anyway, with the working shown, because a rent-vs-buy section that only ever concluded “buy” would be worthless to the reader and obvious to anyone paying attention.
There is a second, smaller conflict. Amazon pays a higher commission rate on physical books than on musical instruments, which makes our method-book pages more profitable per sale than our instrument roundups. We say so on each of those pages, and the advice on them is consistently to buy one book rather than a full set.
What the commission does not change
- Which product we recommend. Rankings come from the criteria on our methodology page, applied in a fixed order.
- The order we rank them in. Commission rate is not one of the criteria and never has been.
- Whether we say to skip something. Every roundup carries at least one honest “we would skip this”, including against products we would earn on.
- Whether we recommend buying at all. See the rent-vs-buy conflict above.
Prices
Every price on this site comes from a live data feed and carries the date it was checked. No price is typed by a human, and the whole layer expires after 48 hours — if the refresh stops running, every number disappears and the buttons fall back to “Check price on Amazon”.
That is a deliberate structural choice rather than a policy. It means we cannot show you a stale price, even by accident.
What we do not do
- Sponsored placements. Zero. No brand has paid to appear on this site, and none can.
- Free products in exchange for coverage. Zero. We own none of the instruments here, which is stated plainly on the methodology page.
- Paid links or link exchanges. None.
- Fabricated reviews or ratings. There are no testimonials anywhere on this site, because we have no customers and therefore none to publish honestly.
Where the disclosure appears
In three places, deliberately: in the footer of every page, in a short notice above the first affiliate link on every page that recommends a product, and here in full. Under each buy button you will also see #ad, the date the price was checked, and a link back to this page.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site looks commercially motivated, we would genuinely like to hear about it. Email info@reedandrosin.com or use the contact form.
Reed & Rosin is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC.