Royalties are collected long before anyone knows which work earned them. Unison exists to close that gap: identify the work, attach it to your name, and show you the evidence.
Songtrust and Sentric sell a roster and a promise. The questions below are the ones a writer or a publisher actually asks after the second unexplained statement.
Money that cannot be matched to a work is held as unidentified and then shared out by market share — so income generated by the independent sector ends up with whoever is largest. Unison attacks the cause rather than the symptom: getting the work identified in the first place.
Usage, works and earnings are in the portal against the source they came from. Not a total to accept on trust, but the detail underneath it — which work, which channel, which territory.
No fixed fee and no annual fee. An administration fee comes off royalty income, which means Unison is paid when you are paid and not before.
Applications are handled case by case — there are requirements about the works you hold and about how they are managed today, so the first step is a conversation rather than a form.
Tell us whether you are a writer, a publisher, or both. Each application is looked at on its own terms, so this is a conversation about your catalogue and not a signup flow.
Your repertoire arrives as the industry files it or as a spreadsheet. Whichever you have is the one to send.
Every work is registered and given the codes it needs to be recognised anywhere in the chain. This is the step that decides whether the money ever finds you, and it is the step most of the industry treats as paperwork.
Usage comes in from the sources that measure it, is matched against your registered works, and appears in the portal as earnings you can trace back to a use.
The client portal is the same system Unison runs on internally, not a summary produced for you afterwards. If it is in the data, it is in the portal.
What has been collected, broken down by channel, territory and work — with the usage behind each figure rather than only the total.
Which of your works were used, where, and on which platform or service.
Everything registered in your name, with its identifiers, splits and status. Where a work is still being resolved, it says so.
The audiovisual and recording detail that decides whether a synchronisation or a broadcast is attributed to you at all.
Each distribution as a document, with the lines that make it up. A statement you cannot take apart is a statement you can only believe.
Collection mapped by territory, so a market that is producing nothing is visible as a gap rather than as an absence you never noticed.
Withdrawing a catalogue from a collective management organisation is a documented, ordinary process, and it is the part most rights holders assume will be hardest. It is not. What it needs is somebody who has done it before to tell you the order of the steps.
Unison is an independent rights management entity — an RME, not a collecting society — and a CISAC Client Member. That distinction matters here: it is what lets the same catalogue be administered under different terms without leaving the standards the rest of the industry uses.
Bring us the situation as it is, including the parts of it that are untidy. Every application is handled case by case, and that is the point of doing it that way.
From the very beginning, working with Unison has been a huge benefit for me and my team. They were really hands-on and helpful, taking the time to explain everything and helping me get the most out of my songs and my music.
Writers, publishers and catalogue rights holders. Say which you are and what is managed where today, and the conversation starts from something real.