In order to launch full operations at the beginning of 2021, as required by the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (MMA), we began by building the systems and capabilities needed to receive and process the data required to distribute blanket royalties. This work allowed us to complete our first monthly royalty distribution on time in April of 2021. Since then, we have completed monthly royalty distributions — all on time or early — and as of May 2022 we have distributed more than a half a billion dollars in digital audio mechanicals to our Members.
At the same time, we established our public database of musical works data, launched our Matching and Claiming Tools, and invited you, our Members, to Play Your Part™ by reviewing the data in our database, registering any missing musical works, and supplementing the data we had for your existing works where needed. Since these tools were launched, you have answered our call, enabling us to process millions of new works registrations and add data for millions of new unique works to our database.
With the blanket royalty distribution process firmly established, we shifted our focus to the historical unmatched royalties. On February 16, 2021, The MLC announced that 20 DSPs transferred a total of $424,384,786 in accrued historical unmatched royalties to The MLC. The DSPs also provided The MLC with initial sets of usage data related to historical unmatched royalties. Read The MLC’s press release on these transfers here.
On June 15, 2021, 15 DSPs provided The MLC with additional usage data pertaining to historical unmatched royalties, supplementing the data they sent to The MLC as part of the February 2021 transfers. By the end of summer 2021, The MLC had received more than 4,000 data files from the 21 DSPs that transferred historic unmatched royalties.
Starting in fall 2021, we began methodically reviewing, ingesting, and preparing the historical unmatched royalty data we had received. In spring 2022, we completed our work on the first set of historical unmatched royalty data files and began running that data through our internal matching processes.