The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is a nonprofit organisation established under the Music Modernization Act of 2018. It was created to issue blanket mechanical
licences
A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).
A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
for qualified streaming services in the United States, such as
Spotify,
Apple Music,
Amazon Music, and
Tidal.
History
As of January 2021, the MLC began paying
royalties
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset o ...
to rights owners. In October 2022, it was reported that the MLC had paid almost $700 million in blanket royalties to songwriters and publishers.
Funding
The digital services that use the MLC have a legal obligation to spend $33.5 million on their start-up costs and $28.5 million on their first-year operating costs.
Function
To resolve the issue of music creators not getting paid for their work, the MLC built a publicly accessible musical works database and portal that creators and music publishers can use to submit and maintain their musical works data. This is so that when their music is played on streaming services, the generated royalties are collected from digital service providers and distributed to the appropriate songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music publishers.
References
External links
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Music licensing organizations
Music publishing