Royalty Income Tracking

Tracking unpaid royalties starts with ensuring that your musical works are properly registered, including the associated sound recording metadata. By reviewing and updating your works in the Member Hub within The MLC Portal, you help us match and pay royalties attributable to your musical works as quickly and accurately as possible. From there, your approach to tracking unpaid royalties will depend on whether the royalties were earned before or after the effective date of the blanket license on January 1, 2021.

For royalties earned prior to January 1, 2021: 

In February 2021, digital service providers (DSPs) transferred accrued royalties for unmatched uses of musical works that occurred prior to January 1, 2021 (“Historical Unmatched Royalties”) to The MLC, along with the supporting usage data. Since then, we’ve been working to match this data to musical works in our database and distribute royalties accordingly. Any unmatched usage is available for review and claiming in the Member Hub within The MLC Portal. 

The MLC’s Claiming Tool is your primary resource for searching unmatched sound recording usage and claiming royalties attributable to your works.

To stay updated on our progress with historical unmatched royalties, click here. You can also find an overview on our historical unmatched royalties page (which reflects the most current Phono 3 adjustments) here.

Please note: If your musical works (or shares thereof) are subject to an existing voluntary license, royalties matched to these works by The MLC will be payable to you by the applicable DSP or its third-party administrator.

If you believe royalties earned prior to January 1, 2021 were misdirected to another party, you should contact the DSP (or its third-party service provider) responsible for administering these payments.

For royalties earned on or after January 1, 2021:

Carefully review your royalty statements from The MLC to identify any sound recording uses for which you did not receive payment.

You can also use the Matching Tool and Claiming Tool in The MLC Portal to search and claim unmatched usage, and royalties from either blanket license usage or the previously outlined historical royalties.

If you have questions regarding potentially misdirected royalties earned on or after January 1, 2021, please direct your inquiries to The MLC’s Support Team here. Be sure to include your Member name, Member number, impacted works, and any other relevant details with your inquiry.

For a clear, up-to-date view of blanket mechanical royalties reported to us by DSPs that operate under the blanket license we administer — including breakdowns of amounts collected, matched, distributed, and more — check out our Blanket Royalties Dashboard here.