Music Business Worldwide: MLC Hires Richard Thompson as Chief Information Officer and Selects Partners to Develop Data Portal

The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) has appointed former Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) Chair Richard Thompson as Chief Information Officer.

Thompson will be responsible for overseeing the development and launch of the MLC’s data platform to distribute royalties payable to songwriters and copyright owners.

Thompson had been serving in an interim capacity for the MLC since February 2019.
The MLC has also named some of the vendors that will support the creation of the public database, which, as directed by the Music Modernization Act (MMA), will contain critical copyright information on all musical works and will launch on January 1, 2021.

Technology company ConsenSys and mechanical licensing administrator Harry Fox Agency (HFA) received unanimous approval from the MLC Board to become the primary vendors responsible for managing the matching of digital uses to musical works, distributing mechanical royalties, and onboarding songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music publishers and their catalogs to the database.

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