Most of what follows is not obvious, is not explained anywhere by the people who benefit from it staying unexplained, and costs writers real money every year.
A stream generates money in more than one direction at once, and the parts are collected by different organisations that do not talk to each other. The two that matter here are the recording and the song.
The first is the recording royalty, owed to whoever owns the master. Your distributor collects it and pays you. That is the money you already see, and nothing on this site is about it.
The second is owed on the song itself, the melody and the words, which exists separately from any particular recording of it. The song earns twice over: a performance royalty through a PRO, and a mechanical royalty which in the United States is paid by The Mechanical Licensing Collective. The MLC can only pay it to somebody who has claimed the song.
If nobody claimed it, the money sits there. It does not come to you later automatically, and your distributor has nothing to do with it.
This matters, because a clean report here does not mean everything is being collected. The MLC handles one of the four ways a stream generates money.
| US mechanicals (this is what we check) | The reproduction right in the song, for interactive streaming and downloads in the United States. Paid by The MLC under a blanket licence, to publishers, administrators and self-administered songwriters. |
| Performance royalties | The public performance right in the same song. In the US these go through a PRO: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR or AllTrack. Nothing to do with The MLC, and being registered with one does not register you with the other. |
| The recording side | Your distributor or label collects the revenue share on the master. Separately, SoundExchange pays digital performance royalties on non-interactive US services to labels, featured artists and, through the IPRD fund, non-featured performers. |
| Sync, print, sampling | Licensed individually. Nobody collects these for you automatically. |
The MLC is a US institution and covers US usage only. Elsewhere the structure is different: a collecting society usually handles both performance and mechanical rights, with the mechanical side run by its own arm or affiliate. SACEM collects through SDRM in France, PRS through MCPS in the UK, and GEMA, SIAE, SGAE and the rest work along similar lines.
Those societies are supposed to claim your US mechanicals for you through reciprocal arrangements with The MLC. Some do it well. What none of them do is show you what they failed to claim, because a statement lists what arrived, not what did not.
So a European writer with US streams has the same question as an American one, and less visibility over the answer.
When The MLC opened in 2021, twenty-one streaming services handed over the mechanical royalties they had been holding because they could not work out who to pay. $424 million, later adjusted to about $397 million once the rates for 2018 to 2020 were finalised. Apple Music alone contributed over $163 million, Spotify over $152 million.
As of mid-2026, roughly $160 million of that is still unmatched. It is money owed to writers who have never claimed it, mostly because they do not know it exists.
That is only the historical pile. New unmatched royalties accrue every month, because the matching rate on incoming payments is good but not perfect, and every percentage point that misses is somebody's song.
The Music Modernization Act says that after unmatched royalties have been held for a period, The MLC may distribute what remains to publishers on market share. Not to the writers who earned it. To whoever is biggest.
The MLC has not done this yet. As of August 2026 it has made no market share distribution at all, and states that it intends to begin in early 2027, starting with royalties still unclaimed from 2021 usage.
So the money from your 2021 streams has a date on it. If nobody claims it before then, it is redistributed by market share, and an independent writer's share of that is effectively nothing.
| Nobody registered it | The commonest reason by far. Registering a recording with a distributor and registering the song with The MLC are two different acts, and doing the first does not do the second. Self-published writers are the single largest group with money sitting unclaimed. |
| A society was meant to | If you belong to a collecting society, they are supposed to claim your US mechanicals through their reciprocal arrangements. Whether they did, and how completely, is not something your statement tells you: it shows what was collected, never what was not. |
| The recording was never linked | The song is registered, the ownership is right, and this particular recording was never attached to it. The MLC pays on usage, usage arrives tied to a recording, so a song with nothing attached collects nothing. From the outside it looks perfectly healthy, which is why this one goes unnoticed for years. |
| It was released under a name you forgot | Sped-up edits, remixes, a re-upload by a label you have left, a cover. They earn under recording identifiers you have never seen, against a song that is yours. |
The file names every affected song and the one action that fixes it. What you do with it is up to you, and there is more in it than the obvious.
| Register the works | The rows marked Register the work are songs The MLC has never seen. Their tool takes them one at a time, or in bulk from a spreadsheet once you have more than a handful. The file already has the title, the writers and the recording to attach, which is most of what a registration asks for. |
| Match recordings to songs the quiet one | The rows marked Match a recording are songs that exist, are claimed, and have nothing attached. Two columns fix them: the ISRC and the MLC song code, which is exactly what their matching tool wants. |
| File claims | Unclaimed and partly claimed rows tell you which share is missing and who already holds the rest. A claim is filed against the MLC song code in the file. |
| Check who is collecting | The publisher column shows who is on file for each song. A publisher you parted ways with years ago can still be there, still collecting, until somebody corrects it. Registrations outlive the deals behind them. |
| SoundExchange | Different money, on the recording rather than the song. Their registration wants the ISRC, the recording title, the artist, the release title, the UPC and the label. The file carries all six, which is why we keep them. |
| Work out who owns the master | The file carries the label and both copyright lines exactly as they appear on the release. The P line names whoever owns the sound recording, which decides whether a SoundExchange registration is possible at all, and whether a recording in a catalogue is really the seller's to sell. |
| Verify a catalogue before buying it | If you are acquiring a catalogue, the file tells you what is actually registered and collecting versus what is claimed to be. A catalogue with forty per cent of its songs unregistered is worth a different number from one that is properly administered. |
| Reconcile against your distributor | The ISRCs, UPCs and release dates line up with a distributor export, so you can see which releases have no song behind them at all. That is the gap nobody sees, because the two systems never meet. |
The rows are ordered so the ones that need something come first. If you only have an afternoon, work down from the top.
All of it. The MLC's tools are free, and for a few dozen songs an afternoon is genuinely enough. Past a few hundred it becomes a job: every registration is a separate submission, every match is another, and anything contested means corresponding with a publisher who has no reason to hurry.
That is the point at which people ask us to do it, and . Nothing up front, nothing at all if nothing comes back, and the report you already bought is credited against our share.
Some columns will be empty. That is usually the answer rather than a gap.
| Empty columns are removed | A column blank on every row is left out of the file entirely. Search by writer name and there are no ISRCs to report, so there is no ISRC column. You will not find an empty column that should have had something in it. |
| Empty ISWC | Many works have no ISWC at The MLC at all. It is not missing from the report; it is not there. The MLC song code always exists, which is why we use it. |
| Empty linked recordings | Nothing is attached to that song. The song exists, the ownership may be perfect, and it earns nothing, because usage arrives tied to a recording and there is nothing for it to arrive against. |
| Empty release columns | The UPC, release title and links come from the attached recordings. No recording attached means nothing to look up. They are also blank when Spotify has no match, which happens with very recent or withdrawn releases. |
| A snapshot, not a feed | The file reflects the registry on the date at the top of the report. The MLC changes daily, so a claim filed this week will not appear in a report generated last week. |
| ISRC | The identifier for a recording. Looks like
USRC17607839. Every version of a song has its own: the
original, the remix, the live take. Your distributor assigns them. |
| ISWC | The identifier for a song, as opposed to a recording. Many songs have none, which is why we use The MLC's own code instead. |
| MLC song code | What The MLC calls your song internally. Nobody knows their own, and it is only in the report because it is what a claim gets filed against. |
| Unclaimed | The song exists in the registry and nobody has said they own it. The money is being held. |
| Partly claimed | Somebody owns part of it and the rest has no owner. The unclaimed share is being held, and this is very common on co-written songs where one writer has a publisher and the others do not. |
| Not registered | No song exists in the registry for that recording at all. It has to be registered before anything can be claimed. |
| Unlinked recording | Your recording exists at The MLC and a song with the same title exists too, but the two were never connected. Usage arrives tied to the recording and finds nothing to pay. Their matching tool joins them. |
| Orphan recording the quiet one | A song that is registered and claimed, sometimes at 100%, with no recording attached to it at all. It looks perfectly healthy on the work page and earns nothing, because there is nothing for usage to arrive against. This is the finding nobody else surfaces. |
| Wait: no usage reported yet | The MLC has never received this recording. It cannot be matched, because their matching tool only searches recordings they already hold. Recordings arrive when a streaming service reports usage, usually some weeks after release. If one is months old and still absent, that is a question for your distributor rather than for The MLC. |
| Needs a manual check | We could not read a definite answer for that recording, usually because a lookup failed rather than because anything is wrong. Running the scan again normally resolves it. |
| Register the work | No song exists at The MLC for that recording. Nothing has ever been collected on it and nothing will be until a work is registered. |
| Recording not linked | The song is there, this recording is not attached to it, so nothing it earns reaches the song. Fixed by matching, not by registering. |
Checking a single song is free, and so is looking up a writer name. That is The MLC's own public data and you can run the same searches yourself on their site. We are not going to charge you for something they give away.
What is paid is the full dataset for a catalogue: every affected song named, with the writers, publishers, shares, linked recordings and what each one takes to fix, as a file you can work from.
Yes, and for a handful of songs you should. The MLC has a free Matching Tool and a free Claiming Tool, membership costs nothing, and if you have a dozen songs the afternoon it takes is cheaper than paying anyone. We will not pretend otherwise, and the free checks here exist partly so you can decide that for yourself.
It stops being reasonable somewhere in the low hundreds. Each registration is a separate submission, each claim is another, and anything with a competing claimant means corresponding with them. At that point it is a job rather than an afternoon.
No. The MLC pays out on US streams to whoever owns the song, wherever they live. If your music is heard in the United States, this money exists.
Then most of it should already be handled, and a scan is a way of checking rather than a way of finding. What tends to surface is co-writes where the other writer is unrepresented, and old releases from before the deal.
Worth pursuing. Registrations outlive the deals behind them: a publisher you have parted ways with can still be on file and still collecting until somebody corrects it. Names in the registry are also often the administrator rather than the company you signed with, so an unfamiliar name is not automatically wrong.
The historical pool covers usage from 2007 to 2020 and is the money the streaming services handed over when The MLC opened. About $160 million of it was still unmatched in mid-2026. Everything from 2021 onwards flows through The MLC monthly, and whatever goes unclaimed accumulates the same way.
The 2021 money is the urgent part, because that is where market share distribution is expected to start in early 2027.
For US mechanicals on that catalogue, on the day we looked, yes. That is one of four streams. Your performance royalties go through a PRO, your recording income through your distributor and SoundExchange, and sync is licensed one deal at a time. A clean report here says nothing about any of them.
No, and we are not affiliated with them. We read their public data and compare it against what you released, which is something they cannot do because they have no way of knowing what you put out.
The MLC states that the accuracy of its database is determined by its members, so we report what it says on the day we read it, and every report carries that date. We would rather tell you a result is uncertain than guess: anything we cannot determine is marked as such rather than being reported as a finding.
We run the searches you asked for and keep the results so your report still works when you come back to it. We do not sell anything, we do not add you to a mailing list, and there are no advertising or analytics trackers on this site. The privacy page is short and worth the two minutes.
You keep 80% of everything we recover. Nothing up front, and nothing at all if nothing comes back. The details are on the page.
The MLC publishes them: the $424 million transfer, the adjusted total, what has been matched and distributed, and its market share distribution plans are all on their own site and in their press releases. We have linked the underlying searches wherever you can run them yourself. Figures here were last checked in September 2026 and will drift, so treat them as the shape of the problem rather than today's exact balance.
Tell us: . This page exists because the subject is badly explained everywhere else, so if a part of it is badly explained here, that is worth knowing.