The MLC teams up with multiple data matching companies to improve publishing royalty tracking
Data Matching is how Music Publishing royalties are tracked. The MLC partnering with five organisations that specialise in this means more royalties will be entering the pockets of composers.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is a nonprofit organisation created by the U.S. Congress whose purpose is to administer mechanical licences for digital music services in the United States.
The centralised database is used to track and distribute royalties to songwriters, composers, and publishers.
The MLC’s match rate is currently at 90% accuracy which will now increase with their new partnership with these specialist data trackers – this is referred to as a “Supplemental Matching Network”.
Andrew Mitchell, who is head of analytics & automation at The MLC said “These vendors bring complementary technologies and capabilities that can be effectively leveraged to serve our members. This network reflects our ongoing commitment to evolve in innovative ways to best achieve The MLC’s mission”.
Who are the Data Trackers and what are they focusing on?
The five companies currently included in the Supplemental Matching Network are Blokur, Jaxsta, Pex, Salt and SX Works.
They all work within digital music data, and work alongside multiple PROs (Performance Rights Organisations) and MROs (Mechanical Rights Organisations) to help with data tracking in Publishing. SX Works is a subsidiary to SoundExchange, who collect Non-interactive streaming royalties from the US.
This newly formed Supplemental Matching Network will focus on the most difficult royalties to match. This will be music made by unsigned and independent artists – some of which will not even realise they have money sitting in a pot waiting for them.
How can RouteNote Publishing help?
We are partnered with The MLC directly to collect royalties on our users behalf. We deal with the entire upload process and will add composers to the MLC database making it easy to track royalties years down the line.
With The MLC becoming increasingly accurate with their royalty payouts, it’s more important than ever for independent songwriters and composers to be collecting these royalties. Especially since the amount of royalties being collected are growing day by day.