The MLC Has Paid Out Over $4.2 Billion — and a New Chapter for Unclaimed Royalties Begins in 2027

October 6

	Five years in, the Mechanical Licensing Collective has quietly become one of the biggest success stories in the modern music business. Since launching in January 2021, The MLC has distributed more than $4.2 billion in mechanical royalties to songwriters and publishers. It has processed nearly $5 billion in total. That milestone was confirmed at its Annual Membership Meeting last week in Nashville, where the organisation also revealed its next major step. Starting in April 2027, The MLC will begin paying out the remaining unmatched and unclaimed royalties on a market-share basis — the first time it has ever used this mechanism, which was written into the Music Modernization Act. These are the royalties the collective has collected but has not yet been able to match to a song or claim by a rightsholder. Under the law, The MLC must hold them for at least three years while continuing to try to find their owners. Once that period ends, the remaining money (plus statutory interest) must be distributed according to relative market shares. The MLC will begin with the leftover royalties from January 2021 usage — the very first month digital services reported under the blanket licence. By the time that payment goes out, the organisation will have spent more than six years trying to match those royalties, twice the legal minimum. Subsequent months of 2021 usage will follow, one at a time. As of its September 2026 distribution, just over $6 million remained unmatched or unclaimed from that first month. The MLC expects the figure to fall further before the April 2027 payout. “Distributing more than $4.2 billion in total royalties to rightsholders is an important milestone,” said CEO Kris Ahrend. “The start of market share distributions in April 2027 represents another important step in fulfilling The MLC’s statutory responsibilities under the MMA.” The organisation now counts more than 100,000 members (up over 27,000 this year alone) and holds data on more than 60 million works. Its match rate sits above 92% overall and reaches 94% for 2021 usage. It has also made significant progress on the older “historical unmatched royalties” that digital services transferred in 2021 — money from streams between 2007 and 2020 that the platforms themselves could never properly distribute. Of the roughly $397 million remaining after rate adjustments, The MLC has already matched and paid out more than $238 million. The April 2027 market-share distributions will only cover the blanket licence royalties from 2021 onwards. Historical royalties will be handled separately once that process is underway. Five years after it opened its doors, The MLC has turned a complex new legal system into a functioning, high-volume royalty engine. The next phase — finally releasing the money that still can’t be matched — will test whether that system can close the last gaps as cleanly as it has handled the rest. Source: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/