Your unclaimed mechanicals have a deadline: the MLC starts market-share payouts in 2027

Every month, US streaming services pay mechanical royalties for songs they can't connect to an owner. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) holds that money while it tries to match it. That holding period is ending. In a one-sheet revised in June 2026, the MLC says it intends to begin distributing remaining unmatched and unclaimed blanket royalties in 2027, as the Music Modernization Act requires. Anything still unclaimed when its month comes up will be shared out by market share. If you write songs and haven't checked your data with the MLC, now is the time.

What is the "black box", and what happens to it?

Mechanicals are the royalties owed to songwriters and publishers when a song (the composition, not the recording) is reproduced, including the streams and downloads US digital services pay for. Since 1 January 2021 the MLC has administered the blanket licence that digital services use to pay them, according to its royalty income tracking guide. When a service reports a stream the MLC can't link to a registered song, or a song where not every ownership share has been claimed, the money sits in what the industry calls the black box. The MLC's own explainer describes it as a pool rightsholders "could not see, search or quantify" before the MLC existed.

The law sets the endgame. Under 17 U.S.C. § 115(d)(3), the MLC must hold unclaimed royalties for at least three years, then distribute them to known copyright owners according to their relative market shares. It must give public notice at least 90 days before any such distribution. Copyright owners who receive the money must pass a share to their writers in line with reported usage, and no individual songwriter may get less than 50 per cent of what the owner received for their works, whatever their contract says.

How the MLC says it will do it

The MLC has published the outline of its plan in the June one-sheet and on a planning page:

• One month at a time. It will distribute one month of remaining blanket royalties each month, starting with January 2021, the first month services reported under the blanket licence. The planning page says it intends to begin in early 2027.
• Pro rata, per service. Each month's leftover money is split by service and offering, using the MLC's actual distribution data rather than estimates, and paid with interest at the statutory rate. Every song that earned royalties in that month, first time round or through reprocessing, gets its pro rata share.
• Small sums, so far. The planning page puts the unclaimed January 2021 pool at under $7 million and expects later months to be similar. It also notes that holding 2021 money until 2027 is six years, twice the statutory minimum.
• Old money later. Historical royalties from before 2021 are a separate pot. The planning page says about $397 million was transferred from 21 services and over $229 million has been distributed so far. The MLC will look at distributing what remains only after the blanket process is running.

The MLC also says matching keeps improving. Its July 2026 member newsletter reports that about 83 per cent of April 2026 royalty pools matched to registered songs at first pass, while 2021 and 2022 now average 93 to 95 per cent after years of reprocessing.

What to do now

The steps depend on who handles your publishing. The MLC lists them on its royalty income tracking page and in the one-sheet.

If you self-publish (you release your own songs and no publisher or admin collects for you), you are the copyright owner the MLC needs to find. Join the MLC as a member; the MLC says connecting with it is free. Then:

1. Register every song that isn't in the MLC database yet, using its works registration tools.
2. Claim your shares of songs that a co-writer or their publisher has already registered. The Claiming Tool exists for this, and an unclaimed share is the easiest kind of money to lose.
3. Match using the Matching Tool: search unmatched sound recordings and propose matches to your registered works.
4. Read your statements and contact MLC support if you think royalties went to the wrong place.

If you have a publisher or administrator, they register and claim for you, but you can still check their work. The Songwriter Hub is built for writers whose songs are managed by someone else. It lets you build a catalogue by searching the ways your name appears in the database, download the list to check it, request writer-name or IPI fixes, and suggest matches for unmatched recordings. The June one-sheet says more than 10,000 people had joined it.

Do it early rather than waiting for the 90-day notice. The June one-sheet says the MLC is still drawing up the detailed plan over the course of this year, so the cut-off for the first month is not yet public.

What we think

Market share is a fair rule for anonymous money and a harsh one for the people it belonged to. The formula pays each month's leftovers to songs that already earned that month, in proportion to what they earned. Whoever already has the biggest share of streams gets the biggest share of the unmatched money. In practice that means the largest publishers and catalogues. The writers most likely to have money in the pot (self-releasers with messy metadata, people with uncredited co-writes, anyone whose remix or cover never got matched) are exactly the ones who won't share in it, because their songs aren't linked to any earnings. Concern about this is not new: the Copyright Office published a study on unclaimed royalties in July 2021, with detailed suggestions on how this money should be held and distributed.

The sums are smaller than the "black box" headlines suggest. If the MLC is right that each 2021 month holds under $7 million, the whole of 2021 usage is at most roughly $85 million. That is our arithmetic, not an MLC figure. The bigger and older pot, the pre-2021 historical money, where the planning page's figures leave well over $100 million undistributed, has no distribution date. Writers should keep the pressure on that, because it is where the poorest data and the oldest songs sit.

We would also give the MLC credit where it is due. Waiting six years instead of three, using actual distribution data rather than estimates, and the statutory 50 per cent floor for writers are all better than the minimum the law requires. But the floor only helps writers whose publisher receives money in the first place. For an independent songwriter, the protection is a registration done well before the money moves. It takes an afternoon. Once a month's money has been shared out to other rightsholders, we would not count on getting it back.

Sources

• Looking ahead: market share distributions (one-sheet, rev. 06/2026), The MLC
• Looking one year ahead: market share distributions, The MLC
• 17 U.S. Code § 115, Legal Information Institute
• July 2026 Member Newsletter, The MLC
• Royalty Income Tracking, The MLC
• Songwriter Hub, The MLC
• Illuminating the black box, The MLC
• Unclaimed Royalties Study, US Copyright Office, July 2021