Our Unison Recap 2022: a great year!
January has passed in a blink of an eye. A month of review of last year’s achievements and getting the engines tuned and prepared for the year ahead.
When looking back at 2022, we could not be more proud of Unison’s achievements and developments. We have continued to grow and to deliver value to our now more than 600 clients, from 30 different countries, that collectively work for tens of thousands of music creators. We now also represent 14 international collective management organisations in their Pan-European digital collections.
We expanded the team with fantastic additions that have reinforced the company’s reach and capabilities. We have also continued with the development of our rights management platform, mostly on the required back end developments that are necessary to keep up with the always ongoing increase of metadata and licensing avenues. In that field, we have continued to innovate, both with our tech and participating in groundbreaking music tech projects, such as Verifi’s VRDA project.
The Unison team has also been in more music industry events than ever before, and we have created our own curated events within established music industry gatherings such as Digital LIcensing Sessions in Primavera Pro, SEED in Mapas (Canarias) and Circulart (Colombia).
All these operational, team and tech efforts have been translated into a remarkable growth in collections and distributions, which increased by +130% from 2021.
Other projects worth mentioning that we are very proud to be part of include amazing initiatives such as BELEM, a Creative Europe project to support European lyrics translation and monetisation, and Earth Percent, a fantastic and inspirational project to support work against climate change through music creation and intellectual property.
When it comes to projecting to the immediate future, we have been paying a lot of attention to all the conferences we attended to the last quarter of 2022 and beginning of 2023. The three main hot topics that everyone is talking about are the new rise of Web3 and the metaverse, AI and metadata challenges (as always). Particularly interesting were the presentations on these subjects by Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music, as well as the always illustrative and informative sessions organised by companies such as MIDiA or Music Ally.
There were also interesting conversations in relation to the future of streaming and new potential models, algorithmic vs human driven recommendations and had the opportunity to learn from Chris Cooke, co-founder and editor at CMU, on the UK’s parliament investigations on the economics of music streaming.
With all these developments to come this year and so many opportunities ahead, as well as challenges, we are extremely excited to continue to deliver value and growth to our clients, supporting the creative landscape of the music industry, including writers, composers, music publishers and collection agencies, by ensuring that they get remunerated for the exploitation of their creations. And our commitment remains intact, to bring efficiency and transparency into the collective management of music copyrights by the use of technology and a professional, independent and driven team. 2023… here we come!!!