The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) says it has now enrolled more than 100 independent distributors in over 20 countries in a program to identify unpaid mechanical royalties owed on music played on streaming platforms.
The MLC describes the Distributor Unmatched Royalties Portal (DURP) as “a highly efficient and effective way to identify independent, self-administered songwriters who are not yet receiving their digital audio mechanical royalties in the United States.”
Among the distributors who have signed up are Believe, CD Baby, DistroKid, Empire, ONErpm, The Orchard, and TuneCore. The MLC says it has distributed “millions of dollars” in previously unpaid royalties have been identified and paid out so far.
The portal gives distributors access to a subset of The MLC’s publicly available data that’s relevant to songs they have distributed, enabling them to identify customers who may be entitled to back royalties. Those distributors can then notify their customers and encourage them to sign up as MLC members and register their songs. If a distributor also provides publishing admin services, the customer can elect to have their royalties collected through the distributor.
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