Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours (pub.doub.ly)
When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box".
That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers.
This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January.
Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027.
That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywall, the reports are completely actionable without needing anything from us.
The tool: paste a Spotify artist link (or search for a Spotify artist by name). It pulls every release on that profile, checks each recording against The MLC's public bulk data, and tells you per-song whether it's fully claimed, partially claimed, registered but unmatched, or missing entirely. It then provides a link to the exact MLC tool that fixes each case. It also estimates the dollars stuck, as a rough range.
Even if you're not an artist yourself, you probably know someone who is a musician, please share it with them.
Thanks for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions about the industry as a whole, The MLC, the tech, anything really.
29 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadOn that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)
Wow, streaming is great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
In your own words:
> We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate.
As someone who models stuff for part of my living, I understand the spirit of what you are achieving here, but there are too many assumptions / genuine unknowns. Like just in terms of the things you said: you would need the real premium and and supported stream counts over time, the relative market share and stream counts in other services over time, broken down by country, and of course, what "mechanical rate" really means, because there's what Spotify pays versus everything else, and what Spotify, for example, pays, is really fluid.
For other readers: Artists certainly think in terms of pay per stream, but that's not really how Spotify pays, for many payees (the MLC and the other categories). So even though this guy making this website is a professional in the music industry and knows all this, he is so focused on lead gen that he keeps things simple - fine, that's valid - but nonetheless wildly inaccurate.
All that being said, the low-end of the estimate is VERY real, because we sum up an actual number provided by The MLC. For their unmatched data, they provide a range of one dollar sign ($) $0.01 - $0.99, ($$) $1.00 - $10.00, ($$$) $10.01 - $50.00, ($$$$) $50.01 - $250, and ($$$$$) $250.01 and above. Those exact figures get worked into the estimate, and are real hard baselines that we use for the estimate. There is no inflation from us on those figures. When a track has an unbounded (five dollar sign), we then use Spotify counts to estimate where in the range it falls.
I appreciate the thoughtful conversation.
Or is this for music distributed by DistroKid, CDBaby etc. before 2018?
Playing specific songs on demand requires permission, IIRC.
Got a 500 shown as an error message on your site, related to a failed connection to Spotify.
it doesnt seem to have the full catalog
spotify shows the top songs on which i performed at over 20 million views but doesnt appear here. maybe i misunderstood what your service is doing
I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.