We hope you all are enjoying the summer! In this Member newsletter, we provide details about this month’s distribution, offer an important update about the Copyright Office’s recently issued final rule on statutory terminations, share our 2023 Annual Report, give an update about the periodic review of designation, and announce the date of our 2024 Annual Member Meeting.

The MLC completed its seventh royalty distribution of the year on July 12, bringing us to 40 total royalty distributions since we began full operations — all of which were completed on time or early. July’s distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in April of 2024. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was approximately $85.9 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 80 percent of the total royalty pools reported to us by DSPs to songs registered in our database.

After deducting royalties for usage covered by voluntary licenses maintained by DSPs with rightsholders, we collected approximately $82.6 million in royalties and distributed approximately $58.2 million to our Members.

To learn more about our July 2024 distribution, click here:

On July 9, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a final rule regarding the application of the derivative works exception to the statutory termination rights provided in the Copyright Act and its relation to the blanket license established under the Music Modernization Act (MMA). The MLC welcomes this definitive guidance from the Office. To learn what this new rule means for you and what’s next read more here:

Since April, we have been distributing matched historical royalties in sets. We first distribute matched historical royalties for previously unpaid uses reported by the DSP (or DSPs) concerned, followed by royalties for previously partially paid uses from that same DSP (or DSPs).

Last month, we distributed the second group of DSPs of matched Phono 3 historical royalties covering usage from 2018, 2019 and 2020. These royalties pertain to uses during those three years that took place on six digital services: GTL, Mixcloud, Pandora, Qobuz, Recisio, and YouTube. We had planned to pay the set of previously partially paid matched historical royalties from these services in this month’s distribution, but, ultimately, we needed more time to process these royalties. So, on July 12, we notified Members that we would not be including those royalties in the July 2024 distribution as expected. We are currently assessing when we will be able to distribute those royalties. We will let you know which future distribution will include these royalties once we have made that determination.

In the meantime, we still intend to include the first set of royalties for uses on Spotify that took place in 2018 and 2019 in next month's distribution (i.e., the August 2024 distribution) as we had previously announced.

The MLC’s 2023 Annual Report is now available on our website. The report offers a look into our third full year of operations, key performance metrics from 2023, a financial summary and more.

On Monday, July 29, we filed our final submission to the United States Copyright Office in connection with the first periodic review of the designation of The MLC and Digital Licensee Coordinator (DLC) by the Register of Copyrights. In this submission, we responded to the public comments that were filed between April 1 and June 28 and provided several operational updates that we had achieved since filing our initial submission earlier this year. We are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their support of The MLC and comment on the progress we’ve made in the first five years.

To read more information about the periodic review of designation, click here. All filings, from the public, the DLC and The MLC, can be found here.

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