What Is the MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective)?

If you self-release your music, there is a good chance you are collecting roughly two-thirds of the money your streams actually generate — and quietly leaving the rest behind. Not because anyone is cheating you, but because the U.S. royalty system splits a single stream into separate payments handled by separate organizations, and the one most independent artists never set up is the mechanical royalty. That royalty is collected by an organization called the MLC, and the gap between knowing about it and not knowing about it is the difference between getting paid in full and funding bigger publishers by accident. How music royalties work is a deep topic in general; this guide zooms in on the single most-commonly-missed piece of it.

The reason the gap exists is structural, not malicious. Streaming royalties feel like one number — the figure your distributor dashboard shows you each month — but that number is only one of three royalties a stream earns, and your distributor is only built to collect that one. The other two live on the publishing side of your music, and nobody sets them up for you automatically. Streaming royalties are layered, and the MLC sits squarely in the layer indie artists almost always skip.

So the question this guide answers is blunt: are you registered with the MLC, and if not, what is it costing you? By the end you’ll understand exactly what the three royalties are, what the MLC does and doesn’t cover, how to tell whether you’re owed money, and how to register in a single sitting. The honest headline is that for a self-releasing songwriter, registering is one of the highest-return half-hours in your whole music-money setup.

The three-royalty map: where a single stream’s money actually goes

One U.S. stream pays three separate royalties — and your distributor only collects the first. The mechanical (teal) is the one the MLC collects and most indies never set up.

Picture a single play of one of your songs on Spotify in the United States. That one stream doesn’t generate one royalty — it generates three, because your recording and the song written underneath it are two different pieces of intellectual property, and each is owed money.

The first royalty is the master, or sound-recording, royalty. It’s owed to whoever owns the specific recording, which for a self-releasing artist is you. Your distributor collects it and pays it to you, and it’s the number you already see in your dashboard — what most people simply call streaming income. When you compare distributors like DistroKid and TuneCore, this master royalty is the one they’re all built to handle.

The second and third royalties are owed not on the recording but on the composition — the song as written. Every recording sits on top of a composition, and the composition earns its own money. One slice of it is the performance royalty, paid when the song is publicly performed or streamed; that’s collected by your performing-rights organization, or PRO — ASCAP or BMI in the U.S., for example. The other slice is the mechanical royalty, paid because streaming reproduces the composition. In the United States, that mechanical royalty is collected by the MLC.

Here’s the trap in one sentence: your distributor collects the master royalty, your PRO collects the performance royalty, and unless you’ve taken a specific extra step, nobody is collecting your mechanical royalty. Registering with a PRO is the step most artists already know to take; registering with the MLC is its mechanical-royalty twin, and far fewer people know it exists.

Why does one stream split into two copyrights at all? Because a song and a recording of that song are legally distinct works. The composition is the melody, chords and lyrics — the thing a cover band could play from a chart. The sound recording is one specific captured performance of that composition. Copyright treats them as separate property, so they earn separately and are administered by separate organizations. Once that split clicks, the whole royalty system stops feeling arbitrary: every collector you deal with is simply assigned to one side of the line, and the MLC is the U.S. mechanical collector sitting squarely on the composition side.

What the MLC is, and why it suddenly exists

The MLC — the Mechanical Licensing Collective — is a non-profit organization that the U.S. Copyright Office designated to collect digital mechanical royalties in the United States and pay them to songwriters and publishers. It was created by the Music Modernization Act of 2018, a landmark piece of copyright law, and it became operational on January 1, 2021. It’s funded by the streaming services themselves, which is why it’s free for songwriters to join — the operational cost doesn’t come out of your royalties.

Before the MLC, digital mechanicals were a mess. Streaming services were supposed to license each composition individually under the statutory mechanical license in Section 115 of the Copyright Act, but with millions of tracks and incomplete ownership data, matching every recording to its songwriter proved nearly impossible at scale. Royalties piled up unpaid, lawsuits followed, and the system was visibly broken. The MMA’s fix was to replace song-by-song licensing with a single blanket license administered by one central body — the MLC — which collects the mechanicals from the services and takes on the job of matching them to the right people.

The scale of the backlog became concrete in February 2021, when twenty digital service providers transferred a combined $424,384,787 in accrued historical unmatched royalties to the MLC — the largest one-time transfer of songwriter royalties in U.S. history, delivered alongside more than a terabyte of usage data. That money is the famous “black box”: mechanical royalties that had been earned but never paid out because the owner couldn’t be identified.

It’s worth being honest about that figure rather than alarming with it. Most of the original 2021 black box has since been matched and paid out, so it is not a giant pool still sitting there waiting for you to claim a slice. The reason the MLC still matters enormously for you is the ongoing flow: new unmatched royalties accrue every single month from current streams, and if your compositions aren’t registered, your share of that flow is what’s quietly going unmatched right now. The black box wasn’t a one-time accident — it’s a faucet, and it’s still running.

It helps to understand how the matching actually works, because it explains why registration matters so much. The streaming services report enormous volumes of usage data to the MLC — billions of lines describing which recordings were played and how often. The MLC’s job is to link each of those recordings to the underlying composition and its registered owners, then pay them. When your works are registered with clean data, that matching happens and you get paid; when they aren’t, the usage is still reported but there’s nobody on file to pay, so the money waits. You are, in effect, the missing half of a match the system is actively trying to complete.

What the MLC does and doesn’t cover

The MLC has a specific, limited job, and understanding its edges is what keeps you from either missing money or paying twice for collection you don’t need. It collects digital audio mechanical royalties from interactive streaming and downloads inside the United States — and that’s it. Concretely, that means on-demand services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Tidal, operating under the blanket license.

What it does not cover matters just as much. It does not collect performance royalties — those remain your PRO’s job, and they are a genuinely different royalty from the same stream, so you need both. It does not collect from non-interactive or satellite radio like Pandora’s radio mode or SiriusXM; the digital performance royalty on the recording side of those is SoundExchange’s territory, a separate organization people constantly confuse with the MLC. It does not collect so-called micro-sync or user-generated royalties from YouTube’s video platform, TikTok or Facebook. And it does not handle physical mechanicals from vinyl or CDs, sync fees, print, or anything outside the United States.

That international boundary trips people up, so it’s worth stating plainly: the MLC only collects mechanicals for U.S. streams. If your music is streamed abroad, those mechanicals are collected by foreign societies, not the MLC. The reassuring flip side is that you don’t have to be American to collect from the MLC — an international writer can still register and collect their mechanicals for streams that happened inside the United States.

The reason these boundaries are worth memorizing is that confusion costs money in both directions. Assume the MLC covers everything and you might skip your PRO and lose performance royalties; assume your distributor or PRO already handles mechanicals and you leave the MLC’s slice uncollected. Plenty of artists do one or the other for years without noticing, because no error message ever appears — the money simply doesn’t arrive, and you can’t miss what you never saw on a statement. Mapping each royalty to its correct collector once, deliberately, is the only way to be sure none of them is quietly going nowhere.

Are you leaving money on the table? (If you’re distributor-only, probably.)

If you never register, your mechanical doesn’t vanish — it sits unmatched, and after a statutory window it can be redistributed to registered publishers by market share. Illustrative of the MMA mechanism.

Here’s the uncomfortable arithmetic. If you release exclusively through a standard distributor — DistroKid being the most common example — and you’ve never registered with the MLC, then the master royalty on your streams is reaching you and the mechanical royalty on the same streams is not. Standard distribution is built around the recording. It is not designed to register your compositions with the MLC or collect your mechanicals, and most artists never realize those are separate things that need separate setup.

So what happens to the mechanical you’re not collecting? It doesn’t disappear, and it isn’t held for you forever. Under the system the MMA set up, a mechanical the MLC can’t match to a registered owner sits in an unmatched pool while the organization works to identify who it belongs to. After a statutory window passes, royalties that remain unmatched can be distributed to registered publishers on a market-share basis — meaning the bigger a publisher’s catalogue, the larger the slice of leftover unmatched money it absorbs. In plain terms: money you earned but never claimed can end up topping up the majors instead of landing in your account.

How much is actually at stake for any one artist is genuinely hard to pin down, and you’ll see wildly different estimates floated online, so treat any specific dollar figure with suspicion. The honest framing is proportional rather than precise: mechanicals are a meaningful fraction of the composition-side money a stream earns, and for anyone with steady streaming, a year of uncollected mechanicals adds up to real money rather than loose change. The point isn’t a scary number — it’s that the money is yours, the gap is fixable for free, and there’s no upside to leaving it open. If you want the per-stream context, our breakdown of what Spotify pays per stream shows why even a fraction of a fraction matters at volume.

There’s also a subtle trap for collaborators. Mechanicals are split by writer share, and the MLC pays each registered writer their own share. If you wrote a song with someone and only one of you registered, the registered writer gets paid their share while the unregistered co-writer’s share keeps accruing unmatched. Being right about how publishing splits work doesn’t help if the split never gets registered.

It’s worth being specific about the most common case, because it’s so widespread. A producer releasing through a single distributor sees a healthy streaming dashboard, assumes that number is “their royalties,” and never thinks about the composition side at all. The dashboard is real and the master royalties are genuinely paid — but it is structurally only the recording-side money. Even choosing between distributors is a recording-side decision; whichever you pick, the mechanical on your compositions still needs a separate home. The fix isn’t switching distributors — it’s adding the one collector your distributor was never built to be.

How to register with the MLC, step by step

The self-administered registration path end to end. Joining is free and the core sign-up takes well under an hour; matching and the first payment take a cycle or two.

The good news after all that is how low-effort the fix is. Registering as a self-administered songwriter is free, done entirely online, and the core sign-up genuinely takes well under an hour. Here’s the path from start to first payment.

1. Check the Missing Member Lookup. Start by checking whether the MLC may already be holding royalties under your name. The MLC runs a public Missing Member Lookup at themlc.com — a searchable database of rightsholders who aren’t yet members but may be owed money. Searching your artist or legal name takes a minute and tells you whether something is already waiting.

2. Connect to Collect. Next, create your account through the MLC’s Connect to Collect® sign-up. You’ll verify your identity, set up login credentials, and answer a few questions about your role so the system routes you to the right hub. A self-administered songwriter — someone who manages and collects their own royalties rather than working through a publisher — lands in the Member Hub, where registration and statements live.

3. Set up your publisher entity. This sounds more intimidating than it is: if you’re self-administered, your own name operating as a sole proprietor (a DBA) can be the publisher. You don’t need to form a company to collect your own mechanicals.

4. Register each work. Register each musical work — each composition you wrote or co-wrote — entering your ownership share song by song. Supplying or letting the MLC assign an ISWC, the identifier for a composition, sharpens matching; note this is different from the ISRC, which identifies a specific recording.

5. Suggest matches, then get paid. Finally, suggest matches between your sound recordings and your registered works, so the usage data streaming services report can be linked to the right composition and actually pay. After that, the MLC distributes matched mechanicals to members monthly. Registration reaches back to streams from January 2021 onward, so there’s a retroactive component — though the first payment takes a matching cycle or two to arrive rather than landing instantly. Set it up once and it runs in the background from then on.

One detail that surprises people: registration is not only forward-looking. Because the MLC has been collecting since January 2021, registering now can surface mechanicals that have been accruing on your back catalogue for years — provided the usage can still be matched to your newly registered works. That’s why the Missing Member Lookup is the right first step rather than an afterthought: it’s the fastest way to see whether there’s already a balance with your name on it. Treat the whole process as claiming money that is genuinely yours and already earned, not as signing up for a future service.

Doing it yourself vs using a publishing admin

Registering directly with the MLC is the free, do-it-yourself route, and for many self-releasing artists it’s all they need. But there’s an alternative worth understanding, because choosing both at once is a classic mistake. A publishing administrator — services like CD Baby Pro, TuneCore Publishing or Songtrust — registers your works with the MLC and with PROs and societies around the world on your behalf, then takes a percentage of what they collect. They handle the mechanical the MLC covers plus the international and other publishing royalties the MLC doesn’t, in exchange for a cut.

The trade-off is the usual one: a publishing admin saves you administrative effort and reaches royalties beyond the MLC’s U.S.-only scope, but it costs an ongoing percentage that direct MLC registration doesn’t. If your streaming is mostly domestic and you’re comfortable doing a bit of setup, registering directly keeps 100% of your mechanicals. If you have meaningful international streaming, sync ambitions, or simply don’t want to manage it, an admin can be worth the cut. Licensing your music for placements is a separate world an admin can also help with.

The one rule that matters: don’t do both. If you sign up with a publishing administrator, they register your works with the MLC for you — and if you also register the same works directly as a self-administered member, you create conflicting claims that delay or block payment. Pick one path per work. If you’re already with an admin, your job at the MLC is usually just to create a Songwriter Hub login and confirm your works show up correctly, not to re-register them.

If you’re genuinely unsure which route to take, a simple rule of thumb works for most people. If you write your own songs, release mostly to U.S. listeners, and don’t mind an hour of setup, register directly and keep everything. If a meaningful share of your streams comes from outside the U.S., or you collaborate constantly and dread the admin, the percentage a publishing administrator takes is often worth the global reach and the off-loaded paperwork. There is no universally correct answer — only the one that matches your catalogue and your tolerance for doing the registration yourself. The expensive mistake is choosing neither.

Co-writes, covers, international writers and timelines

A few situations come up constantly and deserve clear answers. Co-writes first: every writer on a song must register their own share. The MLC pays per-writer, so your registration collects your percentage and your collaborator’s registration collects theirs — one of you registering does not pull money to the other. If you co-write regularly, getting your songwriting documented and protected and each writer registered is what turns an agreement on paper into actual payments.

Covers are a common point of confusion. If someone else records and releases a cover of your song, that cover’s streams still generate a mechanical owed to you as the writer of the underlying composition — and the MLC is built to match those uses to your registered work. Conversely, if you record a cover of someone else’s song, the mechanical on your recording is owed to their composition, not to you as the recording artist; you still collect the master on your recording through your distributor as usual.

International writers, again: you don’t need to be in the U.S. to collect from the MLC, but the MLC only covers your U.S. streams. Your home-territory society or a publishing admin handles the rest of the world. And on timing — set expectations sensibly. The sign-up is fast, but matching is a process: your first payment typically arrives after a cycle or two rather than the moment you register, and large catalogues take longer to fully register and match than a single track does. None of that changes the verdict; it just means you should register sooner rather than treat it as urgent only when you “have time,” because every month unregistered is a month of mechanicals quietly going unmatched.

Put it into practice

Three short exercises, escalating from a five-minute status check to a clean registration session. Do them in order — each one sets up the next.

Frequently asked questions