It’s hard to believe we’ve begun our second year of operations! I am pleased to report that we have continued to make positive progress in several areas, building on the work we did in 2021. For the first Quarter Note of this year, we will recap some of our key performance metrics
from 2021 and preview some of the things we’re already working on in 2022.
Since the last edition of this newsletter, we published our 2021 Interim Annual Report, recapping the work we did in the lead up to the License Availability Date on January 1, 2021, highlighting some of our key performance metrics from our first full year of operations. We compiled this interim report at the request of U.S. Copyright Office. We will issue our first full annual report (also covering 2021) later this summer.
Now available on the Governance page of our website, The MLC’s 2021 Interim Annual Report offers a look into how we built the organization and began fulfilling our important mission during our first full year of operations. The report also highlights some of our key performance metrics from 2021; includes a summary of our start-up expenses, operating expenses for 2021, and our budget for 2022; and previews some of our plans for 2022.
Each month, The MLC takes the data for unpaid usage from prior distribution periods and reprocesses it using our current musical works data. This reprocessing allows us to apply data from registrations submitted after the initial distribution to those initially unpaid uses.
Over the course of last year, our reprocessing efforts allowed us to distribute well over ten million dollars in royalties to our Members. In just our first two distributions of 2022, our reprocessing of the remaining usage data from those 2021 periods has allowed us to distribute another $5+ million to that total. As a result, the current match rates for all nine of the usage periods we processed in 2021 have now increased to between 85 and 88 percent.
We have been working hard since last fall to prepare the historical unmatched royalty data we received from DSPs for processing. We are pleased to report that we have made great progress, and anticipate beginning to make this historical unmatched royalty data available in our Matching Tool for Members to search over the next few months.
As a refresher, while DSPs were required to transfer their historical unmatched royalties to The MLC in February of 2021, those services had another six months to deliver all of the data files associated with those royalties, and a handful of services subsequently delivered adjustments to their data files when they delivered their annual statements of usage for 2020. By the end of last summer, The MLC had received more than 4,000 data files from the 21 DSPs that transferred historic unmatched royalties.
Since then, The MLC has been methodically reviewing those files, opening each file, one at a time, reviewing the data, identifying and resolving any issues we find, and then preparing those files to be ingested into our internal systems so we can then begin running them through our matching process.
The MLC has recently launched new data management tools for our Members – the Claiming Tool and Public Search API – as well as a suite of resources for French-speaking rightsholders.
Claiming Tool
In early February, we launched the initial version of our Claiming Tool - the newest addition to our suite of data management tools for Members.
Public Search API
The first version of The MLC’s Public Search API is also now available in BETA. Once set-up, the Public Search API allows users to retrieve information about works in The MLC database directly from their own computer systems.
French-Language Resource Page
The MLC recently published a brand new French-language resource page, to help French speaking rightsholders learn about The MLC and the benefits of becoming a Member.
