Black box royalties: what they are, and how to claim yours

60 · 2026-09-28 · 19 min read · Español

Black box royalties are money a collecting society has received for a use of your song or recording and has not paid out, because it could not tell whose work it was or because nobody claimed the share. Every collector holds some. Each has its own rule for how long it waits and what it does on the day the wait ends: in the United States, The MLC pays unmatched and unclaimed mechanicals to other copyright owners by market share, and has said it will start with January 2021’s remaining royalties in early 2027; SoundExchange may apply unclaimed recording royalties to its costs after three years; ASCAP remits what it cannot deliver to the state. Claiming yours is the same three steps at every door: search the collector’s public list for your name and your works, register, claim the share.

• “Black box” is industry shorthand, not a legal term. The US statute defines the two halves: a work is unmatched when its owner has not been identified or located, and royalties become unclaimed accrued royalties once the holding period has run.
• The MLC holds unmatched and unclaimed mechanicals for at least three years with interest, then distributes them to every song and share that earned royalties that month, pro rata. It has made no such distribution yet and plans the first for early 2027, starting with January 2021.
• SoundExchange holds unclaimed recording royalties for three years, after which no claim is valid. ASCAP remits royalties it cannot deliver to the state under unclaimed property law. SOCAN says it releases nothing until it knows where the money belongs.
• The MLC’s own figures: about $397 million of historical unmatched royalties from 2007–2020 transferred in 2021, over $317 million of it matched since; under $7 million remaining from January 2021 usage as of January 2026; and most remaining unmatched recordings holding less than a dollar each.
• Every search is free: The MLC’s Public Work Search and Missing Member Lookup, SoundExchange’s four lists, CMRRA’s Unclaimed Works Portal, SOCAN’s Unidentified Performances list, Re:Sound’s database, and each US state’s unclaimed property search.

What is a black box royalty?

Money a collector received for a use of your work and cannot pay: the owner was not identified or located, or never claimed the share.

The phrase is not in any statute. It is in the legislative history of the law that built the collector most of this page is about: the House Judiciary Committee’s report on the Music Modernization Act, quoted by the Copyright Office in its 2019 Federal Register notice opening a study of the problem — “Unmatched works routinely occur as a result of different spellings of artist names and song titles. . . . The Committee believes that this must end so that all artists are paid for their creations and that so-called ‘black box’ revenue is not a drain on the success of the entire industry.” So-called. Congress used the phrase once, in quotation marks, and then wrote two defined terms into section 115 instead: a musical work is “unmatched” when its copyright owner “has not been identified or located,” and “unclaimed accrued royalties” are the accrued royalties that become eligible for distribution once the holding period has run.

Two failures, then, under one nickname, and The MLC draws the line between them: unmatched is a use with no work found for it, unclaimed is a work found with less than all of its shares claimed. This page will not redraw that line. What it does instead is walk the same question across every collector on the map — because the word is the same at every door and the rules behind the doors are not. The nickname is shit at the one thing a name is for: it makes a published rule sound like a rumour.

Why couldn’t they find you?

Because the use arrived with no link to your work, a name or title spelled unlike your registration, or a share nobody had registered.

The House report’s sentence is the whole diagnosis: different spellings. A collector receives a use as a line of data from a service — a recording, an artist string, a title string, an ISRC if the service sent one — and has to find the work and its owners from that. ASCAP’s help page says what it matches on: “ASCAP uses information like performer names, alternate titles and ISRC codes to automatically match streaming performances to the works in our databases.” The MLC defines the unit it fails on — a sound recording resource, “a single instance of a sound recording that one DSP makes available for streaming or download” — and it fails on it separately for every service that reports it.

So there are three doors into the box, and each has its own page. The artist name spelled two ways is two artists to a matching engine. The recording that went out under two codes is two recordings, one of which nobody registered. The work with no IPI on the writer is a work the engine can find and cannot pay. And the fourth door is not a data problem at all: the co-writer who never joined a society, whose share of an otherwise matched, otherwise paying song sits unclaimed — the case The MLC’s own page opens. None of those doors is fixed here. This page is about what is on the other side of them.

Where does the money go if you never claim it?

Each collector differs: The MLC pays unclaimed mechanicals to other owners by market share, SoundExchange may apply them to costs, ASCAP remits them to states. SOCAN says it releases nothing until it knows where the money belongs.

The United States wrote the mechanical rule down. After the holding period, section 115 says, the collective “shall distribute such accrued royalties, along with a proportionate share of accrued interest, to copyright owners identified in the records of the collective,” in shares “based on data indicating the relative market shares of such copyright owners as reflected in reports of usage.” Two things in that sentence are easy to read past. The interest is real: the statute puts unmatched royalties in an account earning “at the Federal, short-term rate” that “accrues for the benefit of copyright owners entitled to payment.” And the recipients are “copyright owners identified in the records of the collective” — not the majors by name, not anyone by name, but whoever is in the records on the day.

The MLC has now said how it will do it. The remaining royalties for each month will be allocated “on a pro rata basis for each DSP and offering, using The MLC’s actual distribution data, not estimates of market share,” and “Every song or share of a song that earned monthly royalties (whether initially or via reprocessing) will receive its pro rata share of the remaining pool of unmatched and unclaimed royalties for that month.” Its FAQ names the recipients as “music publishers and self-administered songwriters” — a member whose own works are registered is on the list too. And the statute reaches one step past the publisher: an owner that receives a distribution must pass a share to its songwriters, and “in no case shall the payment or credit to an individual songwriter be less than 50 percent of the payment received by the copyright owner attributable to usage of musical works (or shares of works) of that songwriter” — “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary.” Half, by statute, whatever the deal said.

The recording side has a shorter answer and two other pages. SoundExchange holds an unclaimed payment for three years, after which no claim to it is valid and the funds may be applied to its costs — the regulation is quoted whole on the neighbouring-rights page, and which registration gets you paid is its own morning. Its FAQ says the two halves of the rule in two lines: “We collect as far back as 3 years” and “after 3 years royalties expire and SoundExchange is authorized by regulation to release unclaimed royalties.”

The performing right has a third answer, and it is the one nobody mentions. A PRO pays the writers and publishers registered with it, so the black box there is not a work it cannot match but a member it cannot reach. ASCAP’s help page: “ASCAP follows all state unclaimed property law and remits unclaimed royalties according to state requirements. Once royalties have been remitted to the state, ASCAP is unable to retrieve those royalties.” Unclaimed property is a state treasury’s business, and the association of the officials who run it lists what arrives — “Mineral royalty payments” two lines above “Utility security deposits” — with a worked example on the same page about a $500 apartment deposit. Your performance royalties, filed by a state treasurer between somebody’s forgotten security deposit and somebody else’s oil well.

Canada publishes claim tools and no payout rule, and this page will not invent one. SOCAN’s FAQ, on concerts it cannot identify: “we will not distribute or release any funds until we know where they should rightfully go.” A radio play of a song not registered with SOCAN is categorised “unidentified” “until it is identified, at which time payment will be processed.” No expiry is stated, and none is printed here. CMRRA and Re:Sound each publish a search for the money they are holding — both are in the last section — and neither states what becomes of it. The pillar’s sentence stands for the whole page: the money leaves the pool, under somebody else’s name, or it waits.

When does the clock run out?

The MLC plans its first market-share distribution for early 2027, starting with January 2021 and moving one month per month; SoundExchange’s window is three years. A PRO’s clock is the state’s, and Canada publishes none.

The statute says at least three years, and the pillar quotes the sentence. Everything that has happened since is longer. Congress ordered a study of how the collective should find owners, encourage claims and “reduce the incidence of unclaimed royalties,” and the Copyright Office’s 2021 report recommended that unclaimed royalties “should be held for longer than the statutory minimum periods where appropriate,” and that “The first distribution of unclaimed royalties should not occur for at least five years from the date that the ability to claim in the portal is made available to the public, with complete and full functionality and populated with all unmatched usage from periods prior to 2021.” The MLC went past that: “To date, The MLC has made no market share distributions,” and by the first one it “will have held (and attempted to match and distribute) the unclaimed accrued royalties from 2021 usage for at least six years — twice as long as the three-year holding period set forth in the MMA.”

Then the timetable, which is the sentence to write down. “The MLC intends to begin market share distributions in early 2027, starting with remaining unclaimed accrued blanket royalties reported to The MLC for 2021 usage,” distributing “one month of remaining blanket royalties in each monthly royalty distribution, starting with the remaining royalties from January 2021.” The law makes the date public before it happens — notice of “any pending distribution of unclaimed accrued royalties and accrued interest, not less than 90 days before the date on which the distribution is made” — and The MLC says it “will widely publicize the start of these distributions well in advance.” Historical royalties, the 2007–2020 money, come after the blanket ones, on a date it says it will share “well ahead of their eventual start date.”

What a late claim gets is also written down, and it is the reason the order of months matters. A member who claims a share is paid “all related royalties held for past periods, together with statutory interest, excluding only royalties for periods that were already subject to a market share distribution.” Claim in December 2026 and every month since January 2021 is yours, with interest. Claim the week after the first distribution and February 2021 onward is yours, and January is gone — to the songs that were in the records, pro rata, by rule.

Nobody stole it, then. Keep the anger for what is true: the date is published, the notice is statutory, and every dollar goes to whoever was in the records — which is a list you can still get on.

How big is it, honestly?

By The MLC’s own figures: about $397 million of pre-2021 unmatched royalties transferred, over $317 million since matched, under $7 million left from January 2021.

Those are the first dollar figures for unclaimed money this site has printed, and the reason is that they are the collector’s own, with dates. The MLC’s historical-royalties page: twenty-one services transferred their pre-2021 unmatched royalties by February 2021, “approximately $427 million” at first, revised to “approximately $397 million” once the Copyright Royalty Board finalised the rates for the Phonorecords III period. Its market-share page: “We have matched over $317 million (or nearly 80 percent) of the historical royalties originally transferred to us to registered works in our database, and we have distributed over $229 million (or nearly 58 percent).” For the blanket years: “As of the completion of the January 2026 royalty distribution, The MLC was holding less than $7 million in remaining unmatched and unclaimed royalties from January 2021 usage,” with later months expected to be “comparable”; “Our current average match rate for all 2021 usage is now 94 percent.” A dashboard now shows the 2021 pools month by month — reported, distributed, in dispute, remaining — and “projected monthly market share distributions over the next 12 months.” None of this is on a distributor statement, and none of it ever was.

Then the sentence that should be quoted more often than the nine-figure one: “fewer than 5 percent of the remaining unmatched sound recording resources have accrued more than $1 in royalties across all periods, and of the over 95 percent that have accrued less than $1, their average cumulative value is only between 5 and 6 cents each.” The black box is mostly a jar of pennies with excellent press.

Mostly is not entirely, and the arithmetic cuts the other way too. The MLC says “only a small fraction” of 2021’s unmatched recordings and unclaimed shares have accrued over $100 — a small fraction of many millions of resources is still a room full of people, and the one figure that matters is the one under your name. The search for it is free and takes a minute. No other collector on this page publishes a size for what it holds, and this page prints none for them.

How do you claim yours?

Search each collector’s public list for your name and works, register with the ones holding money for you, and claim the shares. Every search here is free, and most need no account.

One door at a time, with what you type and where.

• The MLC, before you join. Public Work Search, open to anyone: search your titles and check two things — that the work is there, and that its shares add up to 100 percent claimed. Then the Missing Member Lookup, also open to anyone: “enter your rightsholder information (your given name or the name through which you collect royalties) in the search field below and click the search button.” If your name is on it, The MLC is holding blanket royalties for a non-member, and the page’s own caveat applies: “Any royalties The MLC may owe you do not include any historical unmatched royalties.” Historical money is not on that list; it is matched to the works in the database, so the route to it is registering the work.
• The MLC, once you have. “Connecting with The MLC is free and easy,” and how to register, and who should not is another page. Inside the portal, two tools do the claiming. The Claiming Tool is for a work somebody else registered — a co-writer, a former publisher — where your share is the unclaimed part: “search for musical works in The MLC’s database to which they wish to register a claim.” The Matching Tool is for a recording of yours a service reported that found no work: “search for recordings and submit match recommendations for their registered songs,” each reviewed by The MLC’s matching team before it is paid. Unmatched is the second tool; unclaimed is the first.
• SoundExchange. Four public lists — “SoundExchange maintains four lists that reflect different statuses for each music creator for which we have collected unclaimed royalties” — unregistered artists, partially unregistered artists, unregistered performers, unregistered sound recording owners, with a search on top and no account. It collects as far back as three years; which account you open, and as what, is the SoundExchange page’s job.
• Your PRO. ASCAP’s remittance runs on your address and banking details, so the claim is the one nobody thinks of as a claim: keep both current. If a cheque already went to a state, the state has it, and every state runs a free search — NAUPA’s site maps to each one.
• SOCAN. Log in, then “go to SOCAN Performances & Repertoire, select Unidentified Performances, then select concerts with no set lists,” and search that list for shows you played. For anything else, the FAQ makes an offer worth taking: “we’ll be sure to investigate, on your behalf, any unclaimed royalties that may be owed to you.”
• CMRRA. The Unclaimed Works Portal in CMRRA Direct lets a publisher or self-published writer “search the active repertoire of Online Music Services in Canada, in order to identify any as yet unmatched recordings, or unverified shares of matched works for claiming.” It needs a CMRRA Direct account, and approval “can take up to 3 business days.”
• Re:Sound. The database holds “all recordings that appear in broadcast or user logs provided to Re:Sound” — as of this writing, “user logs for periods up until the end of 2023.” Search by artist or track; if you find one you played on or own, the page names the organisation to contact for each half.

Then the fix for the next release, which costs nothing and closes three of the four doors. One spelling of every name, on every form, in the fields the spelling lives in. Both codes on the recording and the work. Both halves of you registered with the collector that pays each half, and an audit that checks the registrations against the list, not against your memory of having done it.

FAQ

Is “black box” the same thing as unmatched royalties?

No; black box is industry shorthand with no statutory meaning, and the US statute and The MLC each use two defined terms instead. Unmatched means no work was found for a reported use; unclaimed means the work was found and less than 100% of its shares have been claimed; and once the holding period has run, both become unclaimed accrued royalties.

If I register now, do I get the money from before I registered?

At The MLC, yes, for every period not yet paid out by market share, with statutory interest; SoundExchange collects as far back as three years; money a PRO has already remitted to a state is claimed from that state. A claim filed after a month’s pool has been distributed receives every later month and never that one.

Does the market-share distribution mean the major publishers get my money?

It goes pro rata to every song or share that earned royalties in that month, by The MLC’s actual distribution data, so a larger catalogue receives a larger share and a self-administered member’s registered works receive theirs. A publisher receiving a distribution must pass at least half of the part attributable to a songwriter’s works to that songwriter, whatever the contract says.

Do I need a publishing administrator to claim it?

No; The MLC’s membership and registration are free and a self-administered writer claims directly. A writer who already has a publisher or administrator should check with them first, because that company may already have registered and claimed the share.

Sources

• 17 U.S.C. § 115 (Cornell LII) — § 115(e)(34) and (35), the definitions of unclaimed accrued royalties and of unmatched; § 115(d)(3)(H)(ii), the interest-bearing account at the Federal short-term rate; § 115(d)(3)(J)(i), the distribution after the holding period to copyright owners identified in the collective’s records by relative market share; § 115(d)(3)(J)(iii), the public claiming facility and the 90 days’ notice; § 115(d)(3)(J)(iv), the songwriter’s 50 percent floor notwithstanding any agreement.
• Federal Register, Unclaimed Royalties Study: Kickoff Symposium, 84 FR 58176 (2019-10-30), U.S. Copyright Office (govinfo) — the passage of H.R. Rep. No. 115-651 quoted at 7–8: different spellings of artist names and song titles, and “so-called ‘black box’ revenue”.
• U.S. Copyright Office, Unclaimed Royalties Study — the study’s mandate under the Music Modernization Act: to identify and locate owners, encourage claims, and reduce the incidence of unclaimed royalties.
• U.S. Copyright Office, Unclaimed Royalties: Best Practice Recommendations for the Mechanical Licensing Collective (PDF, 2021-07-08) — that unclaimed royalties should be held longer than the statutory minimum where appropriate, and that the first distribution should not occur for at least five years from the date a fully functional claiming portal is available to the public.
• The MLC, Frequently Asked Questions — The MLC — the definitions of unmatched, historical unmatched and unclaimed royalties; the three-year minimum hold with interest; and distribution to music publishers and self-administered songwriters on a market-share formula.
• The MLC, Market Share Distributions — that no market share distribution has been made; the plan to begin in early 2027 with January 2021 usage, one month per monthly distribution; pro rata allocation by DSP and offering on actual distribution data; every earning song or share receiving its share; six years held against the three-year minimum; the under-$7-million January 2021 figure as of the January 2026 distribution; the 94 percent 2021 match rate; the over-$317-million and over-$229-million historical figures; the sentences on resources under $1 and over $100; late claims paid for every period not yet distributed; the statutory notice and publicity; and the quotation of § 115(d)(3)(J)(iv).
• The MLC, Historical Royalties — twenty-one DSPs transferring their 2007–2020 unmatched royalties by February 2021; approximately $427 million initially and approximately $397 million after the Phonorecords III rate adjustments; the dashboard’s data as of September 2026.
• The MLC, Unclaimed Accrued Royalties — the dashboard of remaining 2021 unclaimed accrued royalties by month, and projected monthly market share distributions over the next twelve months.
• The MLC, Missing Member Lookup — the search of rightsholders who are not yet members and may be owed US digital audio mechanical royalties; that those royalties exclude historical unmatched royalties; and that connecting with The MLC is free.
• The MLC, Frequently Asked Questions — Play Your Part — the Claiming Tool and the Matching Tool, and The MLC’s review of each match recommendation.
• SoundExchange, Frequently Asked Questions — that it collects as far back as three years, and that after three years royalties expire and it is authorised by regulation to release unclaimed royalties.
• SoundExchange, Artists, Labels & Producers — the four public lists of creators for whom it has collected unclaimed royalties, and the search open to anyone.
• ASCAP, Royalties & Payment — that ASCAP follows state unclaimed property law, remits unclaimed royalties to the state and cannot retrieve them afterwards; and that it matches streams on performer names, alternate titles and ISRC codes.
• National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, What is unclaimed property? — that after a dormancy period property must by law be turned over to the state; the list of property types, including mineral royalty payments and utility security deposits; the apartment-deposit example; and that searching is free in every state.
• SOCAN, FAQ — the Unidentified Concert Performances list and how to reach it; that SOCAN will not distribute or release funds until it knows where they should rightfully go; the “unidentified” category for a radio play of an unregistered song; and its offer to investigate unclaimed royalties on a member’s behalf.
• CMRRA, Unclaimed Works Portal — the search of online music services’ active repertoire in Canada for unmatched recordings and unverified shares; the CMRRA Direct account it needs; and the approval time.
• Re:Sound, Database — that the searchable database holds every recording in the broadcast and user logs Re:Sound receives, to the end of 2023 at this writing, and which organisation to contact on a match.

Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. The MLC’s timetable, figures and dashboard change on its own schedule, and each figure above carries the date The MLC gave it; the dashboard is linked for the current one. The Copyright Office’s report is a PDF and was read from its text streams rather than a rendered page, and every sentence quoted from it was checked against the study page’s own summary. Nothing on this page is legal advice about your catalogue: the statute is quoted with its own qualifiers, and a lawyer is the person who applies them to your facts.

Keeping the register

Every search on this page is your own list checked against a collector’s, and the list is the thing nobody keeps: each name spelled once, the ISRC on every recording, the ISWC and the IPI on every work, and the shares that add up to 100. CatalogTracker keeps it — per-track ISRC and ISWC, parties with IPI and ISNI, publishing splits that must sum to 100, and a search by any of those identifiers — so the name you type into a lookup is the name on the record and not a memory of it. It does not search any collector, register anything or claim anything. It is the copy you check them against. In development for iPhone.