We completed our eighth monthly royalty distribution of the year on August 14, bringing us to 29 total royalty distributions since we began full operations — all of which have been on time or early. August’s distribution primarily covered newly reported usage that took place in May of 2023. The total of all royalty pools reported to The MLC for this cycle was approximately $88.9 million.

Every month our team attempts to match sound recording uses to the musical works data in our public database and then distributes the resulting matched royalties to our Members. This month, we were able to match more than 85 percent of the total royalty pools we administered to songs currently registered in our database.

After deducting royalties for usage covered by voluntary licenses maintained by DSPs with rightsholders, we collected approximately $84.5 million in royalties and distributed approximately $62.6 million to our Members. 

As you regularly see in our monthly newsletters, we always break down the remaining royalties that are pending distribution into the following three categories: unmatched, unclaimed and on hold. We do this to provide greater transparency into the reasons these royalties are being held and to help you understand the steps you can take to help us reduce these amounts. For a refresher on these terms and what you can do to collect your royalties, check out the Annual Royalty Recap we shared in February.

This month, the remaining royalties still pending distribution break down as follows:

  • $12.8 million in royalties for uses we have not been able to match to registered works;
  • $7.4 million in royalties for shares of matched works that have not yet been registered (or claimed) by our Members; and 
  • $1.7 million in matched royalties that are on hold.

In addition, The MLC also distributed another $7.7 million in blanket royalties from previously unmatched or unclaimed uses that we were able to match, through reprocessing, to data submitted to us after we completed the initial distribution cycle for that usage. Thanks to reprocessing, our current match rates for each month of usage we initially distributed in 2021 and 2022 now range between 88 and 92 percent.

This month, we began planning for the delivery of revised historical usage data from digital services now that the Phonorecords III rates have been finalized; so, for the first time, we did not perform any reprocessing of the remaining unmatched data for historical royalties. To recap, though, we’ve already distributed more than 80 percent of the historical royalties we received for uses that took place between 2007 and 2012, and roughly 45 percent of the historical royalties we received for uses that took place between 2013 and 2017. We expect to continue to reprocess the remaining unmatched historical data again next month and distribute any newly matched royalties in September’s distribution.

To catch up on the progress we’ve shared about historical unmatched royalties so far, you can find all the updates here. For more background information, you can read an overview here.

Finally, we have one correction to make about the metrics we shared last month for the July distribution. The amount of royalties we distributed last month as a result of reprocessing was actually $6.0 million, not $5.5 million as we’d previously reported.