Historical Unmatched Royalties Update

As a refresher, while DSPs were required to transfer their historic unmatched royalties to The MLC early last year, they had until last summer to deliver all of the data files associated with those royalties – and those data files are the key to the work The MLC is now doing to try and match those royalties to works in our database. By the end of last summer, The MLC had received more than 4,000 data files from the 21 DSPs that transferred historic unmatched royalties. The MLC then began the methodical process of opening and ingesting each file, one-at-a-time, in order to determine the data each file contained, to identify and address any issues with the data, and then to prepare those files to be ingested into The MLC’s internal systems. The MLC’s goal was to complete this initial phase of the process by the end of last year. We’re pleased to report that we were able to meet that goal for all but a handful of those files. (We are actively working with the relevant DSPs to resolve issues with under a dozen files.)

Now that we have been able to ingest these files, we have begun mapping the data to the appropriate data tables in our database. Once that task is completed, we will be able to begin running each file through our internal matching process in order to see how much of it we can now match. As you’ll recall, our Members submitted millions of works registrations over the course of last year, which added more than 7 million unique works to our database. We are excited to see the impact these new registrations will have as we begin running this historical data through our matching process. Once we complete our initial attempt to match these works, we will take the remaining unmatched data from each file and add it to the data that is searchable using our Matching Tool, where Members will then be able to access and search the historical data just like they currently do with the unmatched activity from the blanket royalty process. All of this will pave the way for us to begin distributing the first batches of historical royalties later this year.

We will continue to provide additional updates on this process in our Member Newsletter as the year progresses.