The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is the sole non-profit organization in the United States designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to collect and pay out digital audio mechanical royalties to independent songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, publishing administrators, and collective management organizations (CMOs) pursuant to the Music Modernization Act of 2018.
These "songwriter royalties" are paid to The MLC by digital service providers such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, SoundCloud, Tidal, and many others when your songs are streamed or downloaded in the United States. We then pay out the royalties to our members.
Every month, dozens of digital music services report streams and downloads of sound recordings to The MLC. We then try to match those sound recording to the songs that have been registered with us by our members (all songs are searchable in our The MLC's Public Work Search) so that we can pay out the digital audio mechanical royalties to the correct songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, publishing administrators or foriegn collective management organization. When we are unable to match a sound recording to songs registered in our database, the sound recording becomes classified as an unmatched recording and the associated digital audio mechanical royalties are held at The MLC.
This Songwriter Lookup enables songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music producers to search for your name to see if The MLC may have royalties on hold for songs that you wrote or composed, which have been streamed or downloaded on digital music services in the United States. If you have unclaimed royalties, we will invite you to attend a free webinar to learn more about your rights and entitles and the options for going about collecting your royalties.