What Is the MLC and How Do I Register?
The Mechanical Licensing Collective collects mechanical royalties from every stream on Spotify, Apple Music, and every other major DSP. If you haven't registered, that money is sitting in a pool waiting to be claimed — or quietly redistributed to other writers.
What Are Mechanical Royalties?
Every time someone streams your song, two separate royalty payments are generated. The first goes to whoever owns the master recording — your distributor handles that one. The second is a mechanical royalty, which is owed to the songwriter for the reproduction of the underlying composition.
Mechanical royalties predate streaming — they originally applied to physical reproductions like vinyl pressings and CDs. In the streaming era, they apply to interactive streams (where the listener chooses what to play) on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Every stream generates a tiny mechanical royalty. Across millions of streams, it adds up.
Your PRO does not collect mechanical royalties. That's a separate system entirely — and that system is the MLC.
What the MLC Does
The Mechanical Licensing Collective was established by the Music Modernization Act of 2018 and became operational in 2021. It's the designated organization responsible for collecting mechanical royalties from digital service providers in the United States and distributing them to the correct songwriters and publishers.
Before the MLC existed, streaming services often couldn't match songs to their correct owners, so mechanical royalties sat in a pool called “black box” money — unclaimed and eventually distributed to whoever had the best matching infrastructure. Independent artists almost never saw it. The MLC was built to fix that.
The MLC is free to register with. There is no fee to join and no percentage taken from your royalties.
How to Register
Registration is done directly at themlc.com. The process is straightforward but requires accurate information — errors in song registration can cause matching failures that delay or prevent payment.
Step 1 — Create an account:
Go to themlc.com and click “Register.”
You can register as a songwriter/individual or as a publisher entity.
If you act as your own publisher, create both accounts — they are separate.
Step 2 — Register your works:
For each song, submit: title, all writers and their IPI numbers, writer splits, publisher info, and your ISRC code.
The ISRC is critical — it's the code that links your registration to actual streaming activity. Your distributor assigns ISRCs when you submit a release.
If a song has multiple versions (clean, explicit, remix), register each version with its own ISRC.
Step 3 — Keep it updated:
Register new releases before they go live.
If you change publishers or update splits, update your MLC registrations.
Check your MLC account periodically — unmatched royalties appear there for you to claim.
The MLC pays out quarterly. Royalties from a given quarter typically arrive 6–8 months later, so don't expect immediate income — but do expect it to accumulate over time.
What About International Mechanical Royalties?
The MLC only covers the United States. International mechanical royalties are collected by mechanical rights organizations in each country — MCPS in the UK, GEMA in Germany, SOCAN in Canada, and so on. These organizations are generally connected through reciprocal agreements, but registration with your US PRO or publishing administrator can help ensure international royalties find their way back to you.
This is one of the areas where having a publishing administrator pays for itself. Tracking down international mechanical collection societies and ensuring your works are properly registered in each territory is time-consuming for an individual artist — it's the kind of ongoing work that DistroDad's publishing administration service handles on your behalf.
Want help making sure your songs are registered with the MLC and collecting everything they're owed? Let's talk.