alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours
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.
Comments
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.
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.
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.
Apologies for the delay, we're back now!
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.
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).
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?
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
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?
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.
Thanks for building this!
I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.