In our final Quarter Note of the year, we share a recap of our Annual Membership Meeting and highlight several notable milestones from The MLC’s third year of operations.
It’s hard to believe the holidays are here! As the year winds down, we are reminded how grateful we are to serve our Members and for the support and partnership we continue to receive from so many of you.
In our final Quarter Note of the year, we share a recap of our Annual Membership Meeting and highlight several notable milestones from The MLC’s third year of operations. While there is still more work ahead of us, we were able to accomplish much this year thanks, in part, to your support in spreading the word about The MLC. We look forward to serving our Members in the coming year and connecting even more rightsholders to their royalties. On behalf of the entire MLC team, we hope you have a happy holiday season!
This year, we are on track to complete another 12 monthly royalty distributions, with December’s upcoming distribution bringing us to 33 total distributions since launching operations in 2021. We are proud to have completed every distribution either on time or early. 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 and innovation 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.
The MLC has collected nearly $2 billion in mechanical royalties from DSPs operating under the blanket license and distributed more than $1.5 billion in blanket royalties and processed another $175 million 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.
On October 24, we held our virtual Annual Membership Meeting, sharing key metrics from the last year and announcing the result of the Board of Directors election. Alisa Coleman was re-elected by The MLC’s Class B Members to serve on the Board of Directors for a second three-year term. Additionally, we announced The MLC’s Class A Members selected Troy Verges to fill the open seat as a Songwriter Director of the Board, which was previously held by Craig Wiseman, whose initial term expired this year. Additionally, the Class A Members selected Kevin Kadish to serve a second three-year term as a Songwriter Director of the Board.
You can read a full recap of the meeting here and watch the recording of the meeting here:
Do you (and your clients) 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:
