This month’s Member newsletter offers updates on our most recent royalty distributions (both for blanket and matched historical royalties), details our new Catalog Export feature in the Portal, and highlights an opportunity to vote for The MLC in the 2023 SXSW PanelPicker. Be sure to check out our webinar calendar and event listing to see what we have planned for September — there are several industry events coming up and we hope to see some of you!
The MLC completed our eighth distribution of the year, and 17th overall, on Friday, August 12th — two days early. (Every distribution we’ve done to date has been completed on time or early.)
This month's distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in May of 2022. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was $61.1 million. We were able to match 85.4 percent of that amount to songs currently registered in our database. (Our current match rate for all periods through last month’s distribution has now surpassed 88 percent.) After deducting royalties for usage covered by voluntary licenses maintained by DSPs with rightsholders, we collected approximately $60.1 million in royalties and distributed over $43.1 million to our Members.
The remaining royalties still pending distribution break down as follows:
$8.9 million in royalties for uses we have not been able to match to registered works;
$5.5 million in royalties for shares of matched works that have not yet been registered (or claimed) by our Members; and
$451k in matched royalties that are on hold.
In addition, The MLC also distributed another $5.1 million in blanket royalties from previously unmatched or unclaimed uses that we were able to match — through reprocessing — to data submitted to us after we completed the initial distribution cycle for that usage.
Finally, this month we distributed approximately $1.3 million in matched historical royalties that were transferred to The MLC by Amazon and Trebel. These matched royalties represent the first set of matched royalties we are distributing for uses that took place on these two services during the Phonorecords 2 rate period (i.e., between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2017) — and for Amazon some additional uses that date back to July 2012. Additionally, we also distributed approximately $500k in newly matched royalties for the other six DSPs we have previously begun to distribute (i.e., Deezer, Hoopla, Pandora, SoundCloud, Tidal, and Apple Music), bringing our total August distribution of matched historical royalties to approximately $1.8 million.
This summer we have continued to share updates about our progress distributing matched historical royalties and making the data for the remaining unmatched historical uses available for Members to search in our Matching Tool. If you want to catch up on any of these Member communications, you can find all the updates here.
Last month we added a new on-demand Catalog Export feature to The MLC Portal. Members can use this to export into an Excel or CSV file the musical works data for all of the works in their catalogs or for a subset of those works using the existing search function. Here are some tips when using this new feature:
The export button can be found to the right of the search terms dropdown on the catalog page.
Once clicked, the user is guided to select a file format and submit a request.
After the request is submitted, the export file is subsequently emailed to them.
Members can search any of the following fields to narrow their catalog before doing an export: Artist, MLC song code, publisher IPI, publisher name, publisher number, writer IPI, writer ID, writer name.
If a search field not in the above list is selected, the export button will not be present.
It’s your data — give it a shot!
SXSW 2023 community voting is now underway! You can vote for The MLC panel topics through August 21. Read more about our pitches and cast your vote at each link below:
