Swiss collecting society SUISA booked CHF 215.6 million in copyright licence income for 2025, and the only revenue line that shrank was the one carrying streaming money earned outside Switzerland.
The group figure was up 2.7 percent on 2024’s CHF 209.9 million. Of it, CHF 191.7 million is available for distribution to writers and publishers, and administrative costs fell 7.2 percent to CHF 39.7 million. Healthy numbers. The composition underneath them is the part worth reading.
Two online lines, moving in opposite directions
From the annual result published on 10 June 2026 and reported by Kleinreport:
- Online income from Switzerland and Liechtenstein: CHF 15.8 million, up 20.5 percent
- Online rights administered worldwide: CHF 41.6 million, down 7.6 percent
- Performing rights: CHF 64.5 million, up 6.8 percent, ahead of broadcasting rights (CHF 60.8 million) for the first time
- Blank media levy: CHF 16.4 million, up 10.6 percent
- Reproduction rights: CHF 3.7 million, up 10.5 percent
Domestic online grew by a fifth. The cross-border online book lost 7.6 percent. Same repertoire, same platforms, two different pipelines.
The Zurich hub most writers have never heard of
SUISA does not license Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music for cross-border use itself. That sits with SUISA Digital Licensing AG, a subsidiary whose back office is Mint Digital Services, a joint venture SUISA set up with the American PRO SESAC. PRO means performing rights organisation.
Mint does not own rights. Per SUISA’s own explainer, it processes DSP usage reports, identifies which repertoire in them belongs to which client, and invoices. The licensing entities are Mint SUISA Licensing and Mint SESAC Licensing, and the arrangement covers online uses outside the United States.
Other societies buy into that hub rather than build one. Israel’s ACUM handed the international online licensing of its 12,300 members and more than 500,000 works to Mint and SUISA Digital Licensing, announced in December 2020. Greece’s AUTODIA followed.
The consequence: a Swiss writer’s stream in Berlin is invoiced by a Zurich company also invoicing for SESAC and third-party publisher repertoire in the same file. The money arrives when that file clears, not when the stream happened.
The six-month floor
SUISA states it plainly on its online distribution page: it settles with individual DSPs at irregular intervals, and no earlier than six months after the use. There is no fixed monthly or quarterly online run to plan around.
Two more mechanics from the same page:
- No settlement is prepared for totals under CHF 5. Small catalogues roll forward instead of paying out.
- SUISA publishes an online per-stream range, not a rate. In Switzerland, CHF 0.003 down to CHF 0.0005 per stream. Worldwide, 0.005 down to 0.0000004.
That bottom figure is not a typo. Four ten-millionths of a franc is what a free-tier stream in a low-ARPU territory is worth on the writer’s side.
Run two clocks, not one
Recording royalties and publishing royalties do not arrive on the same schedule, and collapsing them into one forecast is the most common budgeting error in European independent catalogues.
Your distributor reports master revenue monthly or quarterly off DSP statements. Your society reports the writer’s share on a cycle that starts at six months and is not fixed. A March release produces master income by summer and publishing income no earlier than autumn, usually later.
The lever you actually control is matching. SUISA’s guidance is to register works before they go online and to keep the metadata you send DSPs identical to the registration. Unmatched works do not fail loudly. They sit unallocated and pay nobody.
InterSpace Distribution delivers master metadata over DDEX, which means Digital Data Exchange, the standard message format DSPs ingest. Consistent ISRC, title and contributor data on the master side is what gives a publishing registration something to match against. The two pipelines stay separate, but the identifiers are shared, and that is the one place an independent can close the gap without waiting on a society.
Related reading: Dutch recorded music grew 10 percent while songwriter royalties went the other way, Germany’s market cooled to 2.3 percent growth, and Greece’s law to unlock royalties frozen since 2018.
