Carlos Palop should have been living the dream. A producer and electronic artist, Palop was seeing real traction with some of his lofi tracks. Streams were picking up--and yet the more he looked at his royalty statements, the more discrepancies and oddities he noticed.

He set out to fix this. With a parallel life in library and information sciences, Palop knew the importance of organizing data. He went deep into how information was organized in the music industry, all the struggles of publishing, metadata, and rights administration. He decided to create software to automate some of the processes he found he needed as a composer and artist.

What Palop built for himself, he has now brought to the world as UniteSync, a music rights administration platform that allows independent artists and small labels to collect more money faster. UniteSync can provide lightning-fast audits, procedures that once took weeks or months, finding millions in unclaimed digital royalties.

Though the company is just becoming widely available to the public, UniteSync has audited nearly 1m artists and 1.2m albums--and discovered $40-100m in unclaimed US mechanicals alone. Once found, these royalties are collected by UniteSync thanks to its close relationships with 53 paying sources in 117 territories worldwide, powered by its highly efficient tech built for the industry.

"Discrepancies can be big. Sometimes, songs simply don't get registered properly, or matching systems don't work. The whole industry talks about this. It's hard to give really good service to this many artists but artists deserve it," Palop reflects. "We are seeing that AI and better tech makes this possible or at least easier. We are digital from the beginning, and that's helping us help artists."

UniteSync's approach is straightforward, though the devil is in the details. Once a composer signs on, the platform pulls up all her tracks. After she verifies her splits for each composition, UniteSync's algorithms can determine what has yet to be properly registered and how much money she is due for these unregistered tracks. The system uses IPI data, along with other metadata, to determine all the aliases and name versions for each composer, simplifying matters. Once royalties are found, UniteSync can collect them for a percentage fee.

In addition to publishing administration, UniteSync can manage a composer or artist's neighboring rights and sync licensing. The platform is expanding into enhanced analytics, as well as helpful aids such as AI agents that will guide artists and songwriters through this often complex and potentially confusing realm. 

For Palop, however, the technology is always in service to the artist and to music, the main driving force that led him to build UniteSync. As he puts it, "I always pushed the limit as a composer and as an entrepreneur. But I knew no matter what I did it always had to be connected to music." And what better way to connect than to uncover hidden revenue and create a stable, sustainable foundation for all.