Historical Unmatched Royalty Update

We have been working hard since last fall to prepare the historical unmatched royalty data we received from DSPs for processing. We are pleased to report that we have made great progress, and anticipate beginning to make this historical unmatched royalty data available in our Matching Tool for Members to search beginning within the next few months.

As a refresher, while DSPs were required to transfer their historical unmatched royalties to The MLC in February of 2021, those services had another six months to deliver all of the data files associated with those royalties, and a handful of services subsequently delivered adjustments to their data files when they delivered their annual statements of usage for 2020. 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.  

Since then, The MLC has been methodically reviewing those files, opening each file, one at a time, reviewing the data, identifying and resolving any issues we find, and then preparing those files to be ingested into our internal systems so we can then begin running them through our matching process. The MLC’s goal was to complete this initial phase of the process by the end of last year, and we were able to meet that goal for all but a handful of those files (i.e., less than a dozen.) 

Now that we have ingested 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 may recall, our Members submitted almost 10 million new works registrations over the course of last year; as a result, our database grew by more than 7 million unique works. All this new data should allow us to match a number of previously unmatched uses right away. 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, so Members can also review the data and submit proposed matches to works they have previously registered with The MLC – just as they currently can 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 “matched” historical royalties this summer.