April has been another busy and historic month for The MLC. I’m pleased to report that we have completed our first-ever monthly distribution of mechanical royalties to our Members. Payments were sent out on Friday, April 16th – exactly 75 days after the end of January, right on schedule.
Our distribution of royalties for the first time represented yet another key milestone envisioned by the Music Modernization Act. It was a true team effort in every respect, and I’m grateful for the hard work and dedication of our entire team and the support of our many partners.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
The distribution covered royalties paid on uses of musical works during January 2021.
The royalty pools reported to The MLC totaled more than $53 million.
We were able to match roughly 80 percent of the royalties reported to musical works registered in our public database, which is right in line with industry benchmarks.
As a result of these matches:
The MLC was able to distribute more than $24 million in matched royalties directly to our Members, and
The MLC sent data for an additional $13 million in matched royalties back to DSPs to use as the basis for paying royalties covered by their voluntary licenses with rightsholders.
Now that The MLC has kicked off its cycle of monthly royalty distributions, it is more important than ever for all Members to check the accuracy of their musical works data because doing so is the best way to make sure you’ll receive all of the royalties you are owed. Members can correct any data errors they find and submit new works registrations directly in The MLC Portal. Songwriters affiliated with a publisher, administrator or CMO should contact those entities directly to get their help correcting any data errors they discover.
Anyone can use The MLC’s free Public Search feature – accessible by clicking the yellow button on the top right side of the homepage on our website – to review the musical works ownership data in our database.
Among The MLC’s staff is a group of ten individuals who started in our Associate Development Program. Launched in July 2020, the Program was designed to give entry-level hires the opportunity to expand their knowledge and skills in multiple rights management focus areas and provide them with meaningful professional growth opportunities at an early stage of their careers.
In addition, we recently announced a new, five-part webinar series that will highlight The MLC’s Data Quality Initiative (DQI). Each session will feature one of The MLC’s DQI partners – Vistex, Blokur, Exactuals, Music Data Services and TuneRegistry – presenting their version of the DQI as made available to their customers to showcase its capabilities for checking musical works data in bulk.
One of the best ways to keep up with all of the latest developments here at The MLC is to follow us on social media. Make sure you don’t miss anything!
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