Music users

Pay for the music you used. Not for an estimate of it.

Television and radio, hotels, gyms, retail chains, digital services. If music is part of what you do, you need a licence — and you should be able to see what you are paying for, use by use, with no approximations and no assumptions.

Ask for a quote How rates work

What can be licensed

Four channels, and each one is measured differently.

A licence covers the way music actually reaches your audience. Those ways are not interchangeable — what can be measured, and how precisely, is different in each one, and that is what a rate has to reflect.

Digital

Best measured

Streaming and download services, and platforms carrying user-generated content. This is the channel where usage arrives as data: which work, how many times, in which territory.

Unison holds direct agreements with DSPs and UGC platforms for multi-territorial digital rights, so a digital licence does not have to be assembled country by country.

It is also the channel where a licence can be priced against what was actually played rather than against how large you are, because the reporting is granular enough to support it. Where that reporting is thinner, a rate has to lean on scale instead.

Unison, direct agreements

Radio and TV

Broadcast and the audiovisual productions inside it. Usage is established from broadcast reporting and, for audiovisual, from cue sheets — the document that says which work appears where in a production.

Broadcast reporting, cue sheets

Background music

Music in a space open to the public: hotels, gyms, restaurants, retail. The licence covers the premises, and what is reported is the programming that plays in them.

Reported programming

Live

Concerts and events. Usage comes from the setlist, which makes it the channel where what was played is known most precisely and reported most often by hand.

Setlists

What changes for you

Three things, and the first one is the whole reason to move.

The technology behind this page is the same technology that pays writers and publishers. That is not a coincidence: a licensee paying for measured use and a writer being paid for measured use are the same problem, solved once.

Use, not estimate

When usage can be attributed to specific works, a licence can be priced against what was used rather than against a category you were sorted into. That is better for you when you use less music than the category assumes, and it is the only version of this that is defensible either way.

One counterparty

Digital runs under direct agreements, and everything else through representation agreements with the entities that collect locally. For a business operating in more than one country, that is one relationship instead of a map of them.

Rates you can check

A rate is built from things you can point at: the channel, the reach, how much music. If a quote cannot be taken apart and explained, it is not a rate, it is a number.

How it works

From a first conversation to an invoice you can read.

Four stages. The third is where most licensing arrangements become opaque, and it is the one this is built to keep legible.

Tell us what you use

Which channels, where, and at what scale. A regional radio station, a hotel group and a streaming service are three different conversations, so this one starts with which of them you are.

Channels: digital, radio and TV, background music, live
Territories, premises or reach

Agree the terms

A quote against the channels you named, and an agreement that says what it covers. Rates, agreements and invoices are held in the same system as the works they license, which is why a term can be looked up rather than remembered.

What is covered, and what is not
How use will be established for each channel

03where it usually goes dark

Establish what was used

Usage reaches the platform from the sources that measure it and from what you report, is matched against registered works, and becomes a set of lines rather than a total. This is the step that decides whether your invoice can be explained.

Usage reports processed in bundles, with their own error reporting
Matched against registered works, by identifier where one exists
Errors surfaced as errors, not absorbed into a rounding

Invoice and settle

An invoice you can take apart. The same lines that justify what you pay are the lines that justify what the rights holder receives, which is what makes both halves checkable.

Attributable to the channel and the period
The usage behind the figure, not only the figure

What we need from you

Nobody explains this part, so here it is.

Most of the friction in a licence is administrative, and almost all of it comes from usage reporting. Knowing in advance what is expected removes most of it.

Who you are, commercially
Legal entity, territories, and the premises or services the licence has to cover. Group structures matter here — one licence covering forty hotels is a different document from forty licences.
Which channels
Digital, radio and TV, background music, live, or a combination. Each is established differently, so each is quoted differently.
How you can report use
A file from your scheduling or playout system, a setlist, a platform report. Whatever you already produce is almost certainly enough — the point is to avoid inventing a new process for you.
Reach or scale
Audience, number of premises, subscribers, capacity. Whichever of these applies to your channel is what a rate is built on.
What you are replacing
An existing licence, several of them, or nothing yet. Coming from an existing arrangement changes the order of the steps, not the outcome.
Who to talk to
One named contact on your side who can answer a question about usage reporting. It is the single thing that most changes how quickly this settles down.

Next step

Tell us what you use and we will quote against it.

Broadcasters, digital services, hotel and retail groups, venues, promoters. A first conversation is about your channels and your scale, not about a form.

Ask for a quote How rates work