Our July Member newsletter offers updates on our most recent royalty distributions (both for blanket and matched historical royalties), the CRB Phonorecords 3 rate proceedings, our 2021 Annual Report, and our new Catalog Export feature for Members. Be sure to check out our webinar calendar to see what we have planned for August!
The MLC completed its most recent royalty distribution on Thursday, July 14, our 7th distribution of the year.
This month's distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in April of 2022. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was $63.6 million — our highest ever. We were able to match 85.21 percent of that amount to songs currently registered in our database. 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 $44.2 million to our Members — both all-time highs.
The remaining royalties still pending distribution break down as follows:
$9.4 million in royalties for uses we have not been able to match to registered works;
$5.9 million in royalties for shares of matched works that have not yet been registered (or claimed) by our Members; and
$596k in matched royalties that are on hold.
In addition, The MLC also distributed another $4.3 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, we distributed $2.5 million in royalties for matched historical uses plus interest. Of this amount, more than $2.4 million was for matched uses from Apple Music, while the rest was additional matched royalties resulting from reprocessing the data reported to us by the other DSPs for which we began processing matched historical royalties in June or July. These royalties all pertained to uses that took place during the Phonorecords 2 rate period, between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2017.
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.
This month, we also shared some new information about the Phonorecords 3 rate proceedings before the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) in one of our Member updates. If you missed this update (sent on July 1st), here’s what we shared:
The CRB — which sets the mechanical royalty rates that The MLC uses to calculate and distribute royalties — issued a new ruling addressing the royalty rates that will apply to uses that took place during the Phonorecords 3 rate period. This period covered uses that occurred (or will occur) between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2022. It is The MLC’s understanding that this initial ruling was not a final determination of the Phonorecords 3 rates, but rather just an explanation of the CRB’s decision on what those rates should be.
A number of additional procedural steps will now need to take place before the CRB issues its final determination on these rates and they become effective. We do not know how long it will take for these additional steps to be completed, but based on previous proceedings, it could take several more months. Once the CRB issues a final determination and new regulations reflecting the new rates are published in the Federal Register, The MLC will have a better idea of when DSPs will be required to begin reporting royalties to The MLC at the new rates. Until then, The MLC will continue to process new uses reported by DSPs pursuant to the blanket license at the applicable Phonorecords 2 period rates.
The MLC’s 2021 Annual Report is now available on the Governance page of our website. The report offers a look into our first full year of operations and includes data for a number of our key performance metrics from 2021, a corporate financial summary, and more.
This month we released a new feature for The MLC Portal — an on-demand Catalog Export feature. With this new feature, Members can 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.
