As we close out our third year of operations, we want to thank you all for playing your part in The MLC process! While there is still more work ahead of us, we were able to accomplish much this year thanks to the great work you did registering your new songs, claiming shares of existing songs, proposing matches and spreading the word about The MLC to others in your personal and professional networks.
In our final Member newsletter of the year, we share this month's distribution information, highlight several notable milestones from The MLC’s third year of operations and feature some new educational video content we have produced. On behalf of the entire MLC team, we hope you have a happy holiday season. We look forward to serving you in the coming year!
This month’s distribution brought us to 33 total royalty distributions since we began full operations — all of which have been on time or early. December’s distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in September of 2023. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was approximately $88.2 million.
Every month our team attempts to match sound recording uses to the musical works data in our public database and then distributes the resulting matched royalties to our Members. This month, we were able to match more than 85 percent of the total royalty pools we administered to songs currently registered in our database.
After deducting royalties for usage covered by voluntary licenses maintained by DSPs with rightsholders, we collected approximately $84.1 million in royalties and distributed approximately $61.7 million to our Members. To learn more about our December distribution, click here:
Looking back at our third year of operations, there are several highlights we want to share, including the following:
The MLC successfully processed the change in rates for the Phonorecords IV period that took effect starting on January 1, 2023. Members began receiving their royalties at the new Phonorecords IV rates in our April 2023 royalty distribution.
The MLC grew its membership to more than 33,000 Members — an increase of more than 10,000 Members in 2023.
The MLC continued to receive and process millions of works registrations, growing its database to include data for more than 33 million musical works.
The MLC participated in more than 200 events this year, including in-person industry events held in more than a dozen states (i.e., Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Maryland, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington D.C.) and in several other countries across Central and South America, Asia and Europe.
The MLC surpassed 100,000 social media followers across YouTube, LinkedIn, IG, Facebook, X and TikTok.
Thanks to the continued efforts of our Matching Team, The MLC was able to improve its current match rate for all periods to more than 90 percent of the total royalties processed.
To date, The MLC has processed more than $2 billion in mechanical royalties from DSPs operating under the blanket license and distributed more than $1.7 billion in total royalties (more than $1.5 billion in blanket royalties and $179 thousand in voluntary royalties).
As of May 2023, The MLC had made all of the data for the remaining unmatched historical uses available to be searched in the Matching Tool. By doing this, The MLC effectively “illuminated” the black box for digital audio mechanicals for the first time and gave every Member of The MLC the ability to search this data and propose matches of specific unmatched uses to their already registered works.
To date, The MLC has received and approved more than 1 million proposed matches submitted by our Members using the Matching Tool.
The MLC distributed more than $25 million in historical royalties from pre-Phono 1, Phono 1 and Phono 2 rate periods — roughly 45% of the historical unmatched royalties that it received for these earlier periods.
Do you know the difference between a musical work, a sound recording and an audiovisual work? And did you know that different uses of these creative works involve different rights and types of royalties? The landscape of digital music royalties can seem overwhelming, so we’ve broken it down for you into three short videos. Check out our new video content on our YouTube channel here:
