The Mechanical Licensing Collective: What is it?
As an artist, you might be curious just how mechanical royalties end up in your pocket, and what exactly the MLC has to do with it. In this piece, we shed a little on the process.
Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog
Ever wonder how mechanical royalties get to you? The MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) plays a big part. Interested in learning more about them? Here’s how The MLC helps hard working artists like you every single day.
What is the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC)?
The Mechanical Licensing Collective maintains the world’s most thorough database of music composition copyrights and their owners. Additionally, they collect mechanical royalties from digital music streaming services and transmit those royalties to copyright holders based on the ownership claims.
To put it simply, they get hard-working artists like you your money from royalties.
Did you know that streaming services paid $424 M in unmatched royalties to The Mechanical Licensing Collective?
- With these historical unmatched royalties and usage reports now in hand, The MLC can begin the process of reviewing and analyzing the data in order to find and pay the proper copyright owners.
When does The MLC collect and pay royalties?
The DSP’s send sound recording usage data, and accompanying mechanical royalties to The MLC on a monthly basis. Next, the MLC matches the usage data to the musical works data in their database. Once the data is matched, they pay out mechanical royalties to music publishers, administrators, self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.
What do YOU need to do?
Publishers and creators need to Connect to Collect and become Members of The MLC in order to collect the digital audio mechanical royalties they are owed. — Learn more about this process here…
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Want to learn more?
Head over to Symphonic’s upcoming Live Q&A with Randall Foster & Dae Bogan from The MLC as they answer all your burning questions and provide useful information right from the source.
Randall Foster (GM, Nashville & VP Business Dev at Symphonic) & Dae Bogan (Head of Third-Party Partnerships for The MLC) will be hosting a live Q&A and diving deep into royalty collection, how the platform works, how artists get their money, and so much more.
