In our final Member newsletter of the year, we provide information on our December distribution, our new Statutory Terminations Policy, and the Copyright Royalty Board’s cost-of-living adjustments to the royalty rates for 2025.
As we close out our fourth year of operations, we want to take a moment to thank you for helping make this year a success. While there is still more work ahead of us, we were able to accomplish much in 2024 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.
In our final Member newsletter of the year, we provide information on our December distribution, our new Statutory Terminations Policy, and the Copyright Royalty Board’s cost-of-living adjustments to the royalty rates for 2025. We also share news of an upcoming podcast series from The MLC launching this January. 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!
The MLC completed its twelfth royalty distribution of the year on December 13th, bringing us to 45 total royalty distributions since we began full operations — all of which were completed on time or early. December’s distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in September 2024. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was approximately $92.8 million.
Every month, our team attempts to match the newly reported sound recording uses we receive 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 reported to us by DSPs for their September 2024 usage to songs registered in our database.
After deducting royalties for usage covered by voluntary licenses maintained by DSPs with rightsholders, we collected approximately $89.3 million in royalties and distributed approximately $67.1 million to our Members. To learn more about our December 2024 distribution, click here:
We continue to process adjustments to blanket usage from the last two years of the Phono 3 rate period (2021 and 2022). We processed these Phono 3 adjustments for one new DSP in the December distribution. These adjustments represent the difference between the royalties we initially processed for the usage periods from those two years at the Phono 2 rates and the royalties that are due at the final Phono 3 rates. The aggregate value of the Phono 3 adjustments in the December distribution was approximately $372k.
Blanket Royalties Related to Statutory Terminations Claims
In 2022, when the Copyright Office initiated the proceeding that resulted in new rules related to statutory terminations, The MLC voluntarily suspended its former statutory termination policy pending the outcome of the proceeding. The MLC also began holding royalties for uses of musical works subject to statutory termination claims. We have applied the rules to held royalties and started paying those royalties to rightsholders in last month’s distribution.
The Copyright Office’s rule also requires The MLC to follow a multi-step process for (1) debiting payments made to pre-termination owners under The MLC’s prior statutory terminations policy, and (2) crediting those payments to post-termination owners. In September 2024, we notified all affected Members with detailed information about this adjustment process. In this month’s distribution, we began debiting payments made to pre-termination owners. In the coming months, we will begin crediting those payments to post-termination owners. If you received a notice and have questions about the process, please contact publisherservices@themlc.com.
You can learn more about our new Notice and Dispute Policy for Statutory Terminations later in this newsletter.
Since April, we have been distributing matched historical royalties in sets. For each set of royalties from a given DSP (or DSPs), we first distribute matched historical royalties for previously unpaid uses reported by the DSP(s) concerned, then we aim to distribute matched historical royalties for previously partially paid uses from the same DSP(s) the following month.
This month, we distributed the first set of royalties for Tidal in the amount of $1.6 million. We had originally planned to include matched historical royalties for Amazon’s Phono 3 usage in our December distribution. However, we discovered an issue in the revised data we received from Amazon following the finalization of the Phono 3 rates, which temporarily delayed our processing of these royalties. Instead, we included the first set of matched historical royalties for Phono 3 usage from Tidal in the December distribution, and we plan to include the second set of these royalties in January’s distribution.
Looking ahead, we plan to distribute matched historical royalties for Phono 3 usage from Google Play in our February and March distributions, followed by the matched historical royalties from Amazon in our April and May distributions.
We also continued to reprocess the remaining unmatched historical royalties from previous distributions. This month’s distribution includes newly matched historical royalties for uses that took place between 2007 and 2017 during the Phono 1 and 2 rate periods, and between 2018 and 2020 during the Phono 3 rate period. As a result of reprocessing these remaining unmatched historical usages, we were able to distribute approximately $192k in additional historical royalties this month, plus interest, from a number of digital services.
To read more about the historical royalties we have distributed so far, click here:
Looking back at our fourth year of operations, there are several highlights we want to share:
We’ve added more than 15,000 new members to date in 2024 — putting us on track to have our largest ever annual increase in Members. This brings our total enrollment to more than 50,000 Members.
This year, we’ve added more than 7 million works to our public database, which allows anyone to search The MLC’s song ownership database free of charge. We’ve now compiled data for more than 43 million works.
Our current average match rates for 2021 and 2022 now range between 90 and 94 percent, and our overall current match rate for all periods is now 91 percent.
As of the December distribution, our total royalties distributed has grown to nearly $2.7 billion since we launched full operations in January 2021.
We participated in nearly 270 in-person and virtual events this year, including industry events held in more than 20 states and in several countries across Central and South America, Asia, and Europe. To date, we have now participated in more than 870 outreach and education events.
We’ve added more than 100,000 new social media followers to date in 2024, bringing our total to nearly 235,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and TikTok.
To date, we’ve received, reviewed, and approved nearly 2 million proposed matches submitted by our Members using the Matching Tool, enabling us to distribute millions of dollars in additional royalties that were previously being held.
The U.S. Copyright Office’s specific rules regarding statutory terminations require The MLC to make the procedures by which we handle statutory terminations available on our website. We have now introduced a new Notice and Dispute Policy for Statutory Terminations, which incorporates the detailed, mandatory guidance from the Copyright Office’s rules. You can review the new Notice and Dispute Policy for Statutory Terminations on our website here and find answers to frequently asked questions here.
Each year, under the Copyright Act (Section 115), the Copyright Royalty Judges publish in the Federal Register notice of a cost-of-living adjustment applicable to the royalty rates for the statutory license. The adjusted rates for 2025 are 12.7 cents for the per-work rate and 2.45 cents for the per-minute rate. These rates are applicable for the period beginning January 1, 2025, and ending December 31, 2025. For more information, click here.
The MLC is excited to announce a new podcast launching this January called “Taking Care of Your Music Business." Designed to educate and empower creators at every stage of their career, this podcast will focus on the business aspects of the music industry. We’ll explore all the ways creators earn and access royalties, and we’ll share tools and actionable steps to help creators maximize their earnings. All episodes will be available on our YouTube channel — subscribe here!
Please note our Support Team will have abbreviated holiday hours:
.png?upscale=true&width=220&upscale=true&name=MicrosoftTeams-image%20(32).png)
