A total of 20 DSPs have transferred a combined $424.38 million in accrued historical unmatched royalties to The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) as required in order for them to seek the Music Modernization Act‘s (MMA) limitation on liability for past infringement.
Those DSPs, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, SoundCloud and others, also delivered more than 1,800 data files, which contain in excess of 1.3 terabytes and nine billion lines of data.
Of that $424.38m, $163.3m was received from Apple, $152.2m from Spotify, while Amazon and Google transferred $42.7m and $32.8m, respectively (see below).
According to the MLC, the transfer of these monies “represents the culmination of a months-long effort on the part of The MLC and these DSPs to develop and implement the specifications for these usage reports”.
Now that the MLC has these unmatched royalties and usage reports in hand, it can begin the process of reviewing and analyzing the data in order to find and pay the proper copyright owners.