The Teacher Bill of Rights
If you teach drums and you are reading this, you probably found out you were listed here without being asked. That deserves an explanation and a set of guarantees, in that order.
Why you are listed
We are building a directory of drum teachers in the United States, city by city, because the existing options are bad. TakeLessons, which was the largest player in this space, shut down in November 2024. What is left is mostly generic lead-generation sites that rank well, know nothing about drums, and sell your contact details.
We think a beginner searching for a drum teacher in their city deserves better than that, and we think you deserve better than being a lead.
So we built the directory the way we would want to be listed in it. These are the terms. They are commitments, not marketing.
1. Claiming your listing is free, and always will be
Free forever. Not free during a beta, not free on a starter tier, not free until we raise a round.
Claiming lets you correct your own details, add what you actually teach, set your rate, and control what appears. There is no paid tier of claiming that gets you more.
If we ever cannot afford to keep this promise, the honest thing is to shut the directory down, not to start charging for a listing we created without asking you.
2. Ranking is never for sale
No teacher can pay to appear higher, be featured, be labeled a pick, or push a competitor down. There is no advertising product on these pages and there will not be one.
Money will never change the order of listings and it will never change a price figure. The Price Index method is published in full so you can check that for yourself, and the selection criteria are published for the same reason.
If you are ever offered paid placement on this directory, someone is lying to you. Tell us.
3. Your data leaves with you
You can export everything we hold about your listing, at any time, in a machine-readable format.
You can also ask us to remove your listing entirely, and we will, without a retention offer or a sales call. No conditions and no delay beyond the time it takes to ship the change.
4. Everything we publish about you is traceable
Every fact on your listing comes from a source we can name, with the URL we read it from and the date we read it.
We do not publish anything we cannot trace back. We do not infer your rate, invent your specialties, or guess your availability. If a field is unknown, it stays empty rather than being filled with a plausible assumption.
5. No star ratings, ever
We do not host reviews or star ratings of drum teachers, and we are not going to add them.
One anonymous bad review can materially damage an independent teacher's income, and there is no fair appeals process that a small directory can honestly run. Ratings are also the mechanism by which directories start selling reputation management.
Instead we publish verifiable facts: what you teach, what you charge, whether you take beginners, how fast you respond. Those you can check, and those you can correct.
6. You will know when something changes
If we materially change how the directory works, how listings are ordered, or what we publish about you, claimed teachers are told before it ships, not after.
This page is versioned. The date at the top is the date it last changed.
What we ask in return
Nothing mandatory. But the directory gets better when teachers claim their listings, because you know your own rate better than our crawler ever will, and a claimed listing is the fastest way to correct anything we got wrong.
Our conflict of interest, stated plainly
We make Drum Coach, a drum practice app. We would obviously prefer that people who visit this directory also try our app.
That means we are a company with a product listing the people whose students might use it. We handle that by keeping the two separate: the app is never presented as a substitute for you on a page where someone is looking for a teacher, and the app is never in the Price Index.
We also think the honest version of the comparison favors you. A teacher who watches a student play catches things no software can see. We say that on our own method comparison page, where we are selling.
Contact
Corrections, claims, removals, or an argument about any of the above: support@upbeat.studio.