MLC Unclaimed Royalties: How to Find and Claim the Money the MLC Is Holding for You

There is a good chance the MLC is holding money with your songs attached to it right now, and you have no idea. Unclaimed MLC royalties are one of the most common ways independent artists quietly lose income, and almost nobody talks about it because the whole system was built for publishers, not for the person uploading tracks from a bedroom.

The Mechanical Licensing Collective sits on hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties that were earned but never matched to the right owner. Some of that could be yours. Here is how the money gets stuck, and the exact steps to claim it.

What the MLC is and why it holds your money

The MLC (short for the Mechanical Licensing Collective) was created by the Music Modernization Act and started operating in January 2021. Its one job is to collect mechanical royalties from US streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube, then pay them to the songwriters and publishers who own the compositions.

Here is the part most artists miss. Every stream generates two separate royalties. One pays the owner of the recording, which is the money your distributor sends you. The other pays the owner of the song itself, and that payment splits into performance royalties (collected by your PRO) and mechanical royalties (collected by the MLC in the US). If you never registered with the MLC, the mechanical half of your publishing income has nowhere to land.

How royalties end up unclaimed

When a platform pays the MLC for a stream, the MLC tries to match that payment to a registered composition. If your song is not in the database, or the metadata does not line up, the payment cannot be matched. It lands in what the industry calls the black box: a pool of unmatched royalties waiting for someone to claim them.

When the MLC launched, streaming services handed over roughly $424 million in accrued historical royalties that had built up for years with no home. That figure was later adjusted to around $397 million after the Copyright Royalty Board finalized the rates, and new unmatched royalties pile up every single month on top of it.

The black box is not lost money. It is your money sitting in a room with no name on the door.

The uncomfortable truth about the old black box

Here is where it gets rough. The MLC does not hold unmatched money forever. After a set period, the historical black box gets distributed to publishers based on market share, not on who actually earned it. The majors take the biggest slice because they control the most market share, and the independent songwriter who never registered gets nothing.

Step 1: Check if the MLC has money for you

You can search the MLC database before you even make an account. Go to the MLC Public Search at portal.themlc.com/search. You do not need to log in.

• Search your song titles one by one.
• Search your name as a songwriter, plus any aliases you release under.
• Check the writer shares on each result. If a song shows less than 100 percent claimed, or your name is missing entirely, there is money attached to that gap.

Partially claimed shares are the flashing red lights. A song showing only 50 percent claimed means the other half of its mechanical royalties are sitting unpaid.

Step 2: Create your account and register your works

Joining the MLC is free. Go to themlc.com, click Get Started, and verify your identity. You set up a login and you are in the Member Portal.

Once inside, register every composition you have released. The MLC gives you three tools to work with.

For a handful of songs, use Individual Work Registration. For a large catalog, Bulk Registration handles everything at once. Make sure every ISRC, songwriter name, and split percentage matches what your distributor filed, because mismatched metadata is the number one reason payments fail to match.

Step 3: Use the Claiming Tool for partial matches

If your search turned up songs that are only partly claimed, the Claiming Tool inside the portal lets you claim the missing share directly. This is the step that actually pulls the stuck money out of the black box and assigns it to you. Do it for every song where your share is incomplete.

The math: what this is actually worth

Mechanical royalties per stream are small, but they compound fast across a catalog. The US streaming mechanical works out to very roughly $0.0007 per stream, on top of the recording royalty you already collect.

That is money you never saw on any distributor statement, because your distributor only pays the recording side. If you have been releasing for a few years and never touched the MLC, you could have a real sum in the four figures waiting. Curious how it stacks up against your recording income? Run your numbers through the Spotify calculator or the Apple Music calculator.

How to stop leaking future royalties

Claiming the back catalog is half the job. The other half is making sure nothing new falls into the black box.

• Register every new release with the MLC as soon as it goes live, not months later.
• Keep your songwriter name spelled identically everywhere: distributor, PRO, and MLC.
• Confirm your PRO membership too, since the MLC only handles mechanicals, not performance royalties.
• If you work with a lot of collaborators, a publishing admin like Songtrust or CD Baby Pro also catches international mechanicals the MLC does not reach.

The MLC is not going to chase you down to hand over your money. The system is opt in, and market share redistribution means the artists who act now keep what they earned. Set up the account, register the catalog, claim the partials, and lock in every release going forward.

Once your works are registered, your next release earns from both sides of the split from day one. When you are ready to put out new music, you can get 7% off DistroKid here.