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Unclaimed publishing royalties
Every stream pays twice. Once for the recording, which your distributor handles. Once for the song inside it, which is only paid if somebody claimed that song.
Free. No account, no card. Either field works on its own; both is better.
Reads and submits to
Public registries and published data. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with any of them.
Why this is your problem
The moment you write a song you become three things at once, and only one of them is obvious.
Because you wrote it. This part you knew about.
Because you own it. With no publishing deal, that is you, whether or not you ever thought of it that way.
Because somebody has to register the song and claim what it earns. If nobody is doing this, then nobody is doing it.
Follow the money
This is the path a US mechanical royalty takes on the song side. Nothing here is unusual or contested: it is simply how the system works.
Around $160 million is sitting at that third box today. There is no penalty for a writer not being paid, which is how it quietly became an income stream for whoever is biggest. An independent writer's share of a market-share payout is nothing.
What you get
Not a dashboard to interpret. A file naming every affected song, who is on it, what the shares are, which recordings are linked, and the one action that fixes it.
Register the work. Match a recording. File a claim. Claim a missing share. Each row says which.
Work through it yourself, hand it to whoever administers your catalog, or give it back to us and we will do it.
What a report row looks like
| Song | Status | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| BURN ME SLOWLY | unclaimed | File a claim |
| UNDER THE SUN | claimed | Match a recording |
| PAPER WALLS | not registered | Register the work |
Every song, with the writers, publishers, shares, linked recordings and UPCs behind each row.
The one people miss
If no recording was ever attached to it, there is nothing for the money to arrive against. The MLC pays on usage, usage arrives tied to a recording, and a song with nothing linked collects zero.
On the work page it looks completely healthy. That is why it goes unnoticed for years.
Some catalogs come back almost entirely clean. Others turn out to be mostly unregistered. There is no way to tell which you are without looking, and anyone quoting you a figure beforehand is guessing.
How it works
Your writer name against the registry, or your whole Spotify catalog against it. You see the totals before deciding anything. This reads The MLC's own public data, so we will not charge you for it.
Every affected song named, with who is on file, the shares, the linked recordings, and exactly what each one takes to fix. Act on it yourself or hand it to whoever administers your catalog.
We register the songs, file the claims, resolve the conflicts and collect. Nothing up front, nothing at all if nothing comes back, and you keep 80% of what does.
Working together
The same check and the same engine behind it. What changes is how much of it you want to do yourself.
How this compares
Doing it yourself at The MLC is free and genuinely works. It is in the table because leaving it out would be dishonest.
| SoundsMatch | Doing it yourself | Publishing admin | Doing nothing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to find out | Free | Free | Sign up first | — |
| Sees what you released, not just what is registered | Yes | No | Varies | No |
| Finds songs registered but with no recording linked | Yes | Only one at a time | Rarely surfaced | No |
| Handles a catalog of 50,000 | Yes | Not realistically | Often refused | — |
| You keep | 80% of what is recovered | 100%, minus your time | Typically 75–85% ongoing, on everything | Whatever arrives anyway |
| Takes a cut of royalties you were already collecting | No | No | Usually yes | No |
| Locks up your catalog | No | No | Often, for a term | No |
| Effort from you | A name and a link | Hours to weeks, depending on size | Onboarding, then little | None |
Publishing administrators do more than we do: they collect worldwide, across performance as well as mechanical, and for many writers that is the right answer. This is a narrower job.
Because it reads The MLC's own public database, which you can search yourself on their site. Charging you for something they give away would be a strange way to start.
The comparison between what is registered and what you actually released. The MLC cannot do that, because they have no way of knowing what you put out. And then, if you want it, the work of fixing what it finds.
For a dozen songs, yes, and you probably should. The MLC's matching and claiming tools are free and membership costs nothing. It stops being reasonable somewhere in the low hundreds, where every registration is a separate submission and the contested ones mean corresponding with a publisher.
For US mechanicals, on the day we looked. That is one of four streams: performance royalties go through a PRO, recording income through your distributor and SoundExchange, and sync is licensed one deal at a time.
No. The MLC pays whoever owns the song, wherever they live. If your music is heard in the United States, this money exists. Your society is supposed to claim it for you; whether it did is exactly what the check shows.