Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours

pub.doub.ly

49 points by knaught 4 hours ago

Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists:

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.

slopdetector - 19 minutes ago

Searched for a band/album for which I was a credited performer. The band has eight figures in views - enough to justify pursuing.

Got a 500 shown as an error message on your site, related to a failed connection to Spotify.

addajones - 2 hours ago

Spotify is rate limited so its very difficult to check now. Happy you built it, hopefully we will be able to use it soon to check our catalog.

knaught - 2 hours ago

Thanks for letting me know, I'm checking the logs now.
- addajones - 2 hours ago
  
  appreciate it! I don't want to bombard the system you set up, but very eager to check as I'm sure there could be income not collected and missing.
  - knaught - an hour ago
    
    Appreciate it, we blew through 250K tracks in an hour, the HN hug is real. We have added more capacity.

subract - 3 hours ago

A note: nowhere in your post or the site (except the footer) is the “MLC” acronym expanded. I certainly didn’t know what it was before now.

knaught - 3 hours ago

Excellent point, I'll fix that.

quickdeer - 3 hours ago

I tried running an artist through who is a friend, with a few grand found. Will forward the link to her. Is this Spotify only? Thank you.

knaught - 3 hours ago

Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.
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.)

codersfocus - an hour ago

How can music be on steaming platforms if the owner who should collect this doesn't consent to it? If it's their label posting it, shouldn't the label be handling renumeration?

Or is this for music distributed by DistroKid, CDBaby etc. before 2018?

toast0 - 25 minutes ago

You don't need permission for radio-style playback of songs (in the US). There's a mechanical license available and royalties go to a rights collective.
Playing specific songs on demand requires permission, IIRC.
knaught - an hour ago

Music is broken down into two copyrights: Masters and Publishing.
Masters is the recording themselves, made by recording artists, distributed by record labels and distributors (DistoKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, etc.)
Publishing is the "work" or the song... made by songwriters, and royalties are processed by Music Publishers and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).
A good way to wrap your head around it is... I can record a cover of Katy Perry's Firework... I can distribute that master (and make money) to DSPs like Spotify etc... but I do not own the "song" Firework.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) is the body that governs US digital streaming mechanical royalties, which is a right on the publishing side.
- ted_dunning - an hour ago
  
  Just a note ... "mechanical" royalties are publishing royalties payable when a duplicate is created. Back when the duplicate was sheet music or a record pressing that made sense linguistically. Nowadays, mechanicals are due when a stream is done or a digital copy is made.
  Public performances like a live concert get a different category of license.

needSomeCoffee - 3 hours ago

This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).

knaught - 2 hours ago

When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.

elias_t - 2 hours ago

Wow thanks for this! Right now it’s rate limited, could we pass you the metadata directly maybe? To not burn your ip with their servers

knaught - an hour ago

We just added more capacity, and are adding even more here in a bit.
- 2 hours ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss - 3 hours ago

Seems too good to be true (because it is).

knaught - 3 hours ago

I bet you're a blast at parties. Everything about this is publicly verifiable.
- ljlolel - 2 hours ago
  
  it’s true (ran a music company)
- doctorpangloss - an hour ago
  
  while i do not think you should be downvoted for your comment - I think it is pretty representative of creatives in the music industry, who just seem to be more pissed off in general than others - the thing that is too good to be true is your monetary estimate of value. Of course, if your tool reported the honest answers (nearly "zero" for everybody), people would not pay attention, and this lead gen tool you have developed would not be very interesting.
  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.
  - knaught - 16 minutes ago
    
    I apologize for jumping to that so quickly. I respect your response, and you're correct. There is a lot of nuance to this. It's a best estimate because we don't have all of the information, how much is on Spotify vs other platforms, US plays vs non-US plays.
    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.
    
    doctorpangloss - 4 minutes ago
    
    the range of dollar signs... it sounds like MLC doesn't know haha

orsorna - 3 hours ago

Not really any indication that you are collecting data for your own usage. No source code at least?

On that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?

knaught - 3 hours ago

The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
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)

iamacyborg - 3 hours ago

Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.

Wow, streaming is great.

knaught - 3 hours ago

I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are 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.