It’s hard to believe the holidays are almost here! As the year winds down, we are reminded how grateful we are to have met so many of you this year and for the opportunity to continue serving you.  

In this month’s Member newsletter, we offer details about our most recent royalty distribution, the corrections we made to address the October distribution issue we described in our last newsletter, and an enhancement to the Catalog Export feature in the Portal.  

As the holiday season begins, please note that our Support Team will have abbreviated hours from time to time, starting with Thanksgiving week. You can find the team’s holiday hours below, at the end of the newsletter.  

We wish each of you a happy Thanksgiving!

The MLC completed its eleventh royalty distribution of the year on November 14, bringing us to 44 total royalty distributions since we began full operations — all of which have been completed on time or early. November’s distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in August 2024. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was approximately $79.1 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 nearly 86 percent of the total royalty pools initially reported to us by DSPs for their August 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 $75.1 million in royalties and distributed approximately $56.4 million to our Members.  

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

In our last Member newsletter, we updated you on an issue we discovered while preparing for the November distribution. This issue affected some of the historical royalties included in the October distribution. As a result, we inadvertently included matched historical royalties related to usage on Spotify in 2020 for which Spotify had previously paid some royalties (i.e., previously partially paid uses). This resulted in the incorrect calculation and distribution of these previously partially paid royalties in the October distribution. 

We corrected this in the November distribution by reversing the incorrectly calculated royalties distributed in October and crediting the correctly calculated royalties for those Members entitled to receive them. These corrections are reflected as a "net" total amount on your Payee Activity Statement under "Historical Unmatched Royalties (including interest).”  

As always, if you have any questions, please contact our Support Team. 

We continue to process adjustments to blanket usage from the last two years of the Phono 3 rate period (i.e., 2021 and 2022). We processed these Phono 3 adjustments for two additional DSPs in the November 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 November distribution was approximately $1.9 million. On your Payee Activity Statement, you can see the total amount of these adjustments for your registered works in the row for "Royalty Adjustment - Phono III." The usage-level details for these adjustments are identified in your Royalty Statement by the processing type "Adjustment," for usage periods in 2021 or 2022. 

Additionally, we processed annual adjustments for 2023 blanket usages reported by three DSPs as part of their Annual Reports of Usage (ARoUs). On your Payee Activity Statement, you can see the total amount of these adjustments for your registered works in the row for "Royalty Adjustment - ARoU." The usage-level details for these adjustments are identified in your Royalty Statement by the processing type "Adjustment," for usage periods in 2023.

What happens if DSPs need to correct an overpayment in their adjustments?

In some cases, the total adjustments reported for a given DSP may reflect an overpayment of royalties by that DSP, meaning the adjustments they reported resulted in lower royalties due than those originally reported to The MLC. If any of the adjustments reported to you are correcting overpayments, you will see those identified by negative dollar values in the usage-level details in your Royalty Statement. If the total value of the overpayments reported for the works in your catalog in a given month exceeds the total value of any incremental royalties reported as a result of adjustments, you will see a negative total amount in the debit column of your Payee Activity Statement.

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.  

As we made you aware in our last Member newsletter, in this month’s distribution we resolved an issue involving matched historical royalties related to usage on Spotify in 2020 for previously partially paid uses that were inadvertently included in the October distribution. Importantly, this issue did not affect any of the matched historical royalties we distributed prior to October, and it only impacted a portion of the matched historical royalties we distributed last month.  

Since the issue we resolved related to matched historical royalties that we intended to report for the first time this month, there are no other newly reported matched historical royalties in this month’s distribution. However, we continued to reprocess the remaining unmatched historical usage from previous distributions, so this month’s distribution does include some 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 $260k in additional historical royalties this month, plus interest, from a number of digital services. Any new historical royalties distributed due to reprocessing are identified on your Payee Activity Statement in the row for "Historical Unmatched Royalties (including interest)." 

To read more about the historical royalties we have distributed so far, click here:

The MLC continues to enhance the tools available in the Portal to better support our Members. Based on your feedback, we’ve added the Member Work Identifier field to the Catalog Export feature, which allows Members to easily associate their Member Work Identifiers with MLC Song Codes and ISWCs.

This new field will appear the next time you create a Catalog Export in the Portal. To do this, log in to your Member account, navigate to Catalog in the left-hand menu, apply the necessary filters, and click the Export button.

We hope you find this new feature helpful. Please continue to share your thoughts with us on our growing suite of Member Tools, so we can continue to enhance them and make them even better.

Please note our Support Team will have abbreviated holiday hours: 

November 25 & 26: 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. CT

November 27: 8 a.m. – 1 p.m. CT

November 28 & 29: Closed

December 5: 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. CT

December 10: 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. CT

December 23: 8 a.m. – 12 p.m. CT

December 24 – January 1: Closed

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