What Is the MLC, and Why Is It the Registration Everyone Misses?

If you release music independently and have never registered with the MLC, there is a good chance a royalty stream from your Spotify and Apple Music plays has been accruing without reaching you.

Not a small technicality. A distinct category of money, created by federal law, that no one else collects on your behalf.

What a mechanical royalty is

The name is a century old and actively unhelpful. It dates to player piano rolls — "mechanical" reproduction of a composition.

Today, a mechanical royalty is owed to the songwriter whenever a composition is reproduced. That includes physical copies, downloads, and — the part that matters now — interactive streaming.

Every time someone streams your song on demand, two separate royalties are generated on the composition alone:

1. A performance royalty, collected by your PRO — BMI or ASCAP
2. A mechanical royalty, collected in the US by the MLC

Register with a PRO and stop there, and you are collecting one of the two.

Why the MLC exists

Before 2021, streaming mechanicals in the US were a mess. Services had to identify and license every composition individually, songwriters were hard to find, and enormous sums sat unmatched. Several high-profile lawsuits followed.

The Music Modernization Act of 2018 restructured this. It created a blanket licence for digital services and established the Mechanical Licensing Collective to administer it: one organization to receive the royalties, identify the correct songwriters, and pay them.

Crucially, the MLC is funded by the digital services themselves. It is free for songwriters, and it does not take a commission from your royalties.

What the MLC does not do

The MLC handles one specific thing. It does not collect:

• Performance royalties — your PRO
• Digital performance royalties on your recording — SoundExchange
• Royalties on your master recording from streaming — your distributor pays those
• International mechanicals — the MLC's blanket licence is US-only

That last point matters if you have meaningful overseas listenership. Foreign mechanicals require separate collection, which is one of the arguments for a publishing administrator.

"But my distributor pays me for streams"

They do — for a different right.

When your song is streamed, the money splits along the same fault line as everything else in music rights:

| Side | Who pays you | |---|---| | The recording (master) | Your distributor — DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby | | The composition — performance | Your PRO | | The composition — mechanical | The MLC |

Your distributor pays the recording side. If you wrote the song, the composition side is owed to you as well, and your distributor does not collect it.

This is the single most common misunderstanding in independent music, and it is why the MLC is the registration people miss.

What it costs

Nothing. Registration is free, membership is free, and the MLC does not deduct a commission from your royalties.

You do not need a publisher to join. You do not need to pay a third party for access. Self-published songwriters can register directly.

How to register

1. Go to themlc.com and create a member account
2. Register as a self-administered songwriter if you have no publisher
3. Connect your PRO affiliation and IPI number
4. Register every composition, with writer splits and ISRCs for the recordings

That last step is the actual work. Creating an account collects nothing on its own — the MLC pays on registered works matched to reported streams.

Matching is the whole game

The MLC matches usage reports from streaming services against registered works. Good matching means you get paid; bad matching means your money goes into the unmatched pool.

Things that break matching:

• The composition was never registered — nothing to match against
• Splits do not add to 100%, or co-writers registered conflicting shares
• The recording's ISRC is missing or wrong, so the stream cannot be tied to the work
• Titles differ between registration and release metadata

The MLC provides tools to search unmatched royalties and claim works you believe are yours. If you have been releasing for years without registering, that search is worth your time.

Register before you release, not after

Retroactive claiming is possible, but it is slow and manual, and there are limits on how long unmatched royalties are held before redistribution.

Registering a work at release costs minutes. Reclaiming three years of unmatched royalties across a catalogue is a project.

Do you still need a publisher?

For US streaming mechanicals specifically — no. You can self-administer with the MLC directly and keep 100%.

A publishing administrator like Songtrust becomes worth considering when you have international collection to handle, or enough catalogue that registering everywhere yourself stops being realistic. But paying someone a commission purely to access the MLC on your behalf is money you do not need to spend.

The bottom line

Free. Legally mandated. Collects a royalty stream nobody else collects. Routinely missed.

If you have released music that gets streamed in the US and you have not registered your compositions with the MLC, that is the highest-value hour of admin available to you right now.

The full map is in where your music money actually comes from.

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General information, not legal advice. Verify current terms at themlc.com.

Sonifide keeps splits signed and works registered so your MLC claims match on the first pass. Start free, or have us file it all for you.