// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours
See which of your recordings are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC,
and roughly what that's costing you.
Paste a Spotify artist, album or song link,
or search by name:
The MLC is holding $656M nobody has
claimed. The first $6.41M of it, from
January 2021, gets paid out to market share in
The MLC's own figure for the oldest usage month still unmatched or unclaimed. It goes to the
publishers and writers already collecting, in proportion to what they already
collect, and once it has gone out it is gone. None of it reaches you unless
your name is on the work. The MLC has said it starts in January 2027, and
their January distribution date is the 14th, so that is where the clock runs.
Linked to a work at the MLC with every share claimed. Nothing to do here.
The MLC matches each service's copy of a recording to your work separately, so Spotify, Apple and Pandora are three different matches. Most of yours landed and a few didn't, and money is sitting behind the ones that didn't. Common, and usually the last thing left.
Linked to a work, but some of it has no owner attached and that slice is accruing in the black box. Not always wrong: if you wrote with other people, the unclaimed part may simply be theirs.
Linked to a work, but nobody has claimed any of it. All of its mechanicals are sitting unallocated.
The MLC has this recording and no work behind it, so there is nothing for the money to be paid against. The work may already be registered and simply not attached to this recording, or it may not be there at all.
This recording doesn't appear in the MLC database at all, usually because the streaming services haven't reported it yet. Register the work now and the money lands somewhere when they do, instead of in the black box.