I hope this finds all of you enjoying summer so far. July 1st marked 18 months since The MLC officially began operations and the midway point in our second full year of operations. A lot has happened since our last issue of the Quarter Note.
With the completion of our July monthly royalty distribution — The MLC’s 16th overall — we have now distributed more than $580 million in blanket royalties to our Members, and each of those 16 distributions has been completed on time or ahead of schedule. Additionally, our initial match rates — the percentage of royalties sent to us by DSPs that we have matched to musical works in our database — have continued to improve. Our initial match rate exceeded 85 percent for the first time in our May distribution, and our initial match rates for the June and July distributions were also above 85 percent.
The MLC also achieved two important milestones related to the historical unmatched royalties: we began distributing our first set of matched historical royalties in our June distribution, and we began making the data for the remaining unmatched historical uses available for Members to search in our Matching Tool. We share more details about these two milestones in this newsletter.