Mechanical royalties in the US: The MLC, and what it does not do
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The MLC collects and pays mechanical royalties for one activity: downloads and interactive streams of a musical work in the United States. It states on its own website that it is not involved in any other kind of licence or royalty, and the statute that created it says the same thing twice, in a subsection headed “Savings clauses.” The boundary is not a matter of opinion. What nobody writes down is the other half: the one job it does do only reaches you if your works are registered, your recordings are identified, and every share of every song has somebody’s name on it.
- The MLC pays mechanical royalties on covered activity: permanent downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams of a musical work in the United States.
- It states that it is not involved in public performance royalties, synchronisation royalties, or record royalties. Those sit with a PRO, with a negotiation, and with your distributor and SoundExchange.
- Membership and work registration are free, and The MLC keeps no commission. Its operating costs are paid by the digital services through an assessment set by the Copyright Royalty Board.
- Payment depends on matching sound recording usage to a musical work, so the recording identifiers you supply are what connect a stream to a payment.
- Unmatched and unclaimed are two different failures. Unmatched means no work was found for a use; unclaimed means the work was found and less than 100% of its shares have been claimed.
What does The MLC actually pay you for?
The MLC pays mechanical royalties on covered activity: permanent downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams of a musical work in the United States.
Mechanical royalties are the song’s money rather than the recording’s, and if that distinction is not solid yet, the piece that names all seven streams and the copyright each one comes off is the place to start. This page is about one stream, one collector, and where that collector stops.
“Covered activity” is not a phrase The MLC invented for its website. It is a defined term in 17 U.S.C. §115, and the definition is the outer wall of everything on this page:
The term “covered activity” means the activity of making a digital phonorecord delivery of a musical work, including in the form of a permanent download, limited download, or interactive stream, where such activity qualifies for a compulsory license under this section.
Three things in that list. A permanent download, a limited download, an interactive stream. That is the entire territory, and the rest of this page is mostly the consequences of how small it is.
The machinery inside it is simple enough. The MLC is a nonprofit, designated by the US Copyright Office to collect and distribute these royalties under Title I of the Music Modernization Act of 2018, and it has been administering blanket licences since January 2021. By its own account of the cycle, it receives sound recording usage data and the accompanying royalties from the digital services every month, matches that usage against the musical works in its database, and pays out monthly.
And it keeps none of it. The MLC states that it “does not keep a portion of the mechanical royalties it collects to cover its operating costs,” that those costs are “paid for by DSPs through an administrative assessment set by the United States Copyright Royalty Board,” and that it “distributes 100% of the mechanical royalties it collects.” Joining is free. Registering a work is free.
Sit with that, because it tells you what kind of organisation you are dealing with. Nobody there works on commission. A collective that keeps none of your money has no commercial reason to come looking for you — only a reason to publish precisely what it needs and wait for it to arrive.
What does The MLC say it does not do?
The MLC states that it is not involved in any other type of licence or royalty, including public performance royalties, synchronisation royalties, and record royalties.
Not paraphrased. This is the whole answer, in its own FAQ:
The MLC administers blanket compulsory mechanical licenses, available to eligible streaming and download DSPs in the United States. The MLC is not involved in any other types of licenses or royalties, including public performance licenses or royalties, synchronization licenses or royalties, or record royalties.
The statute agrees, and it agrees in the least ambiguous way available to a legislature: by putting the limits in a subsection and heading it “Savings clauses.” Paragraph (13)(A), “Limitation on activities and rights covered,” says the blanket licence “shall not be construed to extend or apply to activities other than covered activities or to rights other than the exclusive rights of reproduction and distribution licensed under this section.” Paragraph (13)(B) needs no quotation at all, because its heading is the sentence: “Rights of public performance not affected.”
Congress wrote the fence into the same section that built the collective. So here is what is on the other side of it, named rather than gestured at.
Performance royalties are at your PRO. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, AllTrack — the money from radio, venues, television and the performance side of streaming. The MLC is explicit that becoming a member “does not replace other memberships or membership activities” and that songwriters and publishers “still need to join a performing rights organization.”
The recording’s money is somewhere else entirely. Your distributor pays for the recording on interactive services, SoundExchange for the noninteractive ones, and the same page says recording artists “do need to join SoundExchange.” None of it touches the song — which is why a producer’s points never appear on this side of the wall.
Sync is nobody’s. A film, a game, an advertisement — no collective, no blanket, no automatic anything. Somebody negotiates it or it does not happen.
And registering works with The MLC does not do the other registrations either. Its own guidance says registration “does not replace other registration activities” and names the three that matter: a performing rights organisation, the US Copyright Office, and SoundExchange for your recordings.
The MLC has never claimed otherwise. Every sentence above is on its website, in the plainest language it could have chosen. The bullshit is downstream — in the forums, in the explainers, in the friend who set theirs up in an afternoon and told you that was that.
Do you need to join, or is somebody already collecting for you?
If a publisher, administrator, or overseas collective management organisation administers your shares, that party registers your works and collects from The MLC instead of you.
This is the first question and almost nobody asks it first. For a substantial share of the people reading this, the correct action is to do nothing at all, and joining anyway is how a share ends up claimed twice by two parties who both think they are right.
The MLC is blunt about it: if you have assigned the right to register and collect to a music publisher or publishing administrator, “you do not need to become a Member of The MLC,” and — the sentence to actually act on — “if you work with a music publisher or administrator in any capacity, please check with that music publisher or administrator before becoming a Member of The MLC.”
Here is where it gets genuinely confusing, and it is not your fault that it does. Distribution and publishing administration are two different products, frequently sold by the same company, under brands that look like a bundle. The MLC names TuneCore Publishing Administration, CD Baby Boost and Songtrust as services that will register your works and collect for you — and then warns, in its own words, that some of those companies “also offer other services such as digital sound recording distribution” and that you should “be sure you understand which companies and services you have signed up for.” Having an account with a company is not the same as having bought the thing you assumed the account was for. Go and look at what you pay for, not at what the dashboard implies.
If you are outside the United States, the same question has a different shape. Your local collective may already be authorised to collect your US mechanicals for you — The MLC names MCPS in the UK, AMCOS in Australia and SACM in Mexico as examples — in which case the CMO registers your shares and collects from The MLC, and you stay out of it.
Does The MLC cover CDs, vinyl, or anything outside the United States?
No. The blanket licence covers United States digital services only, and mechanical royalties on physical products are licensed directly with the copyright owner.
Three edges, and each one is a place people assume coverage they do not have.
Physical is outside. Record companies, The MLC says, “will still need to secure mechanical licenses and pay mechanical royalties for mechanical uses of musical works in physical products, like CDs and vinyl records.” If somebody pressed your song onto a record, that is a conversation with a person, not a line on a statement from a collective.
Even downloads are not guaranteed to be inside. The blanket licence can cover permanent downloads, but a service may instead keep relying on a record company to license them and pay for them — a pass-through licence. And while The MLC administers the compulsory blanket licence exclusively, it notes that other companies — it names HFA and Music Reports — still administer voluntary licences for digital uses. “The MLC” and “US digital mechanicals” are not synonyms.
The territory is the United States. One country. Your streams in Bogotá, Berlin and Melbourne earn mechanicals in those markets, under those regimes, collected by somebody else entirely. Canada is not a rounding error on the US answer either — it has two doors rather than one, CMRRA and SOCAN, and the map of who collects what on each side of the border is a page of its own.
Why does The MLC need your ISRCs?
The services report sound recording usage, The MLC holds musical works, and the recording identifiers you supply are the join between the two.
This is the part of the machine that decides whether you get paid, and it is almost never explained, because explaining it means admitting that the whole system runs on a lookup that can miss. A stream is a play of a recording. A mechanical royalty is owed on a song. Two different objects in two different databases, and something has to connect them.
The statute legislates for that connection directly. A digital music provider must make good-faith, commercially reasonable efforts to obtain information about
sound recording copyright owners, producers, international standard recording codes, and other information commonly used in the industry to identify sound recordings and match them to the musical works the sound recordings embody
— and, on the other side of the join, “the authorship and ownership of musical works, including songwriters, publisher names, ownership shares, and international standard musical work codes.”
Strip the statutory register off that and it says something very simple. An ISRC on one side, an ISWC on the other, and a match in the middle. Congress wrote your identifier hygiene into the law that pays you.
You can feed the join from your end, and you should. The MLC lets a member supply, per recording: sound recording title, version title, ISRC, recording artist name, record label name, duration. It also runs a Matching Tool, where you search for recordings of your works used under the blanket licence and recommend the match yourself instead of waiting for an algorithm to find you.
Which is why the identifier problems in this catalogue are money problems wearing a filing costume. A recording carrying two ISRCs is two recordings to any matching process. A code that was wrong on delivery is wrong in every report built from it, permanently. And if you have never written these codes down, they can be recovered from what is already live. The machine has no opinion about your song. It has a string.
Unmatched or unclaimed: which one are you?
Unmatched royalties found no matching work in the database; unclaimed royalties found the work but less than 100% of its shares are claimed.
Everyone uses these two words interchangeably and they describe opposite problems. The MLC defines them separately and precisely. Unmatched covers “royalties for musical works where The MLC has not yet matched the data for a particular sound recording use (reported by DSPs) to a musical work in The MLC’s musical works database.” Unclaimed covers royalties it has matched to a work “but where less than 100% of the ownership shares for that matched musical work have been claimed by a Member,” with its own worked example: if 80% of a matched work has been claimed, the remaining 20% is unclaimed.
Two failures, two repairs, and only one of them is yours alone to fix. Unmatched is a data problem: register the work, supply the recordings, use the Matching Tool — the previous section, in other words.
Unclaimed is a people problem, and it is the one that catches co-writers. Each self-administered writer who has kept the right to collect has to join and register their own share; The MLC says each party “should register their share of the work.” So your 50% can be registered, matched, claimed and paying every month while your co-writer’s 50% sits there unclaimed for years. One song. One correct registration. Half a payment. And nothing, anywhere, will tell you it is happening — your statement will simply be the size it is.
A co-writer who will not answer or will not agree is a different problem with its own triage; shares that are wrong rather than missing mean changing a split that is already registered, which has its own order.
Two endings are worth knowing and neither belongs to this page. Money nobody ever claims is held for at least three years and then paid out to other rightsholders on a market-share formula, which the royalty-stream map covers where it belongs. And a share two people both claim is adjudicated by nobody at the collective: The MLC states that it “will not resolve disputes over copyright ownership” and that “the parties to the dispute, or the courts, will decide questions of ownership, not The MLC.” It holds the money and waits. Two claims are not twice as good as one.
One more term, so it stops being a mystery when you meet it: historical unmatched royalties are the ones attached to uses before 1 January 2021, when the blanket licence took effect. Same problem, older date.
What to do this week, in order
Check who administers your shares, search the public database, join if nobody collects for you, register every released work, then supply the recordings.
Five steps, in this order for a reason: the first two are free, take an evening, and stop you creating the exact conflicts the rest of this page describes.
1. Search before you sign anything. The MLC’s Public Works Search is open to anyone, with no account and no membership, so you can find out tonight whether your songs are in the database and whose shares are claimed. El Dorado, with a search box.
2. Find out who administers your shares. Not from memory — from the agreements. A distribution account is not publishing administration. If a publisher, an administrator or a CMO holds the right to collect, they register and they collect, and you stop here.
3. Join, if step 2 says you should. Free, and you join as the party entitled to collect rather than as a writer. This trips up everyone who learned the vocabulary at a PRO: The MLC states plainly that it “does not use these categorizations” and “does not pay separate shares to writers and publishers.” One party, one share, one payment.
4. Register every released work — every song recorded and made available on a US interactive or download service whose copyright has not expired. The MLC leaves no room to negotiate with yourself here: the only way to receive these royalties “is to register your songs with The MLC.” No audio files, no cost.
5. Give it the recordings. ISRC, title, version, artist, label, duration for everything already out, then the Matching Tool for usage reported while you were not looking. Then run the catalogue through the audit, in the order failures propagate — a song missing from The MLC is rarely the only thing missing.
And know what none of it bought you. Your PRO registration is exactly where it was, your SoundExchange registration is exactly where it was, and your sync is still nobody’s job but yours. You have closed one stream out of seven, properly, which is one more than was closed on Monday. Then read the next statement against your own register — the only way you will ever know this worked.
FAQ
Do I need to affiliate with the Harry Fox Agency to be paid by The MLC?
No. The MLC states that you do not need to affiliate with the Harry Fox Agency in order to receive mechanical royalties from The MLC. HFA is a separate company that works as a vendor to The MLC, providing works and member data management, matching of digital uses to musical works, and royalty processing. Seeing its name in the process is not a sign you have missed a step.
Who checks that the streaming services are reporting correctly?
The MLC does, within a limit set by statute: it has the right to audit each digital service provider operating under a blanket mechanical licence once every three years. That is the whole of the external check on the usage numbers your royalties are calculated from, and there is no per-artist version of it.
Do record labels have to send their recording data to The MLC?
No. The MLC states that record companies are not required to directly deliver their sound recording data to it, except to the extent they also operate a digital service or a music publisher. Which is why the identifiers you supply matter: the label that released your record is under no obligation to help the match along.
Is the data I register with The MLC public?
Yes, and deliberately so. The MLC states that its musical works data is publicly available in bulk and can therefore be copied and incorporated into other industry databases, and its Public Works Search is open to anyone, member or not. Assume anything in a work registration can be read and republished by whoever wants it.
Sources
- The MLC, Frequently Asked Questions — The MLC — the designation under the Music Modernization Act of 2018 and the January 2021 start; that it administers blanket compulsory mechanical licences for eligible streaming and download services in the United States and “is not involved in any other types of licenses or royalties”; the monthly reporting, matching and payment cycle; that it keeps no portion of royalties, is funded by an administrative assessment set by the Copyright Royalty Board, and distributes 100%; the definitions of unmatched, unclaimed and historical unmatched royalties with the 80/20 example; the three-year holding period and market-share formula; that it will not resolve ownership disputes; that Public Works Search is open to non-members and the works data is available in bulk and by API for copying into other databases; physical mechanical licences and the permanent-download pass-through licence; that HFA and Music Reports may still administer voluntary licences; that HFA is a separate company working as a vendor and no affiliation with it is required; the right to audit each service once every three years; and that record companies are not required to deliver sound recording data. Each answer carries its own
?jump=anchor if you want to link one directly. - The MLC, Frequently Asked Questions — Play Your Part — that registering with The MLC is the only way to receive these royalties; that registration is free and needs no audio files; that it “does not replace other registration activities” and names a PRO, the US Copyright Office and SoundExchange; the recording fields a member may supply (title, version title, ISRC, artist, label, duration) and the Matching Tool; and that each co-writer entitled to collect registers their own share.
- The MLC, Frequently Asked Questions — Connect to Collect — that membership is free; that it “does not replace other memberships”, with PROs and SoundExchange named; that The MLC “does not pay separate shares to writers and publishers”; that a writer represented by a publisher or administrator does not need to join and should check first; TuneCore Publishing Administration, CD Baby Boost and Songtrust named, with the warning about distribution being a separate service; and the guidance for writers outside the US, naming MCPS, AMCOS and SACM.
- 17 U.S.C. §115 — §115(e)(7), the definition of “covered activity”; §115(d)(13)(A), “Limitation on activities and rights covered”, and §115(d)(13)(B), “Rights of public performance not affected”, both inside the subsection headed “Savings clauses”; and §115(d)(4)(B), “Collection of sound recording information”, for the good-faith obligation to obtain ISRCs and match recordings to the works they embody, and to obtain songwriters, publisher names, ownership shares and international standard musical work codes.
- US Copyright Office, Music Modernization Act — that the Office designated The MLC to collect and distribute mechanical royalty payments under Title I, and that the blanket licensing system covers digital phonorecord deliveries in the form of permanent downloads, limited downloads and interactive streams.
This is not legal advice. Everything above is United States law and one collective’s published policy, stated in general; what you are owed and who administers it depends on agreements this page cannot see. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. Statutory mechanical rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board and change on a schedule, so no rate is quoted here — take any figure you need from The MLC’s own rate documents, and confirm anything operational against the collective’s own pages before you act on it.
Keeping the register
The last three sections are one question wearing different clothes: does the data you hold match the data somebody else is matching against. A work registration wants shares, writers, an ISWC and the recordings that carry the song — which is a register, and most people do not have one. CatalogTracker keeps ISRC and ISWC on the track, IPI and PRO on each party, publishing splits per track with a confirmation state, and searches the catalogue by ISRC, ISWC, UPC, GRid, ISNI or IPI while telling you which identifier matched. It files nothing with anybody. It means the registration form gets answered from one screen instead of six. In development for iPhone.