Hey there! You've come to this webpage because your music distributor has joined the Distributor Unmatched Recordings Portal (DURP) initiative to help The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) find independent songwriters, composers, and lyricists for whom we might have unmatched royalties on hold. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is the sole non-profit organization in the United States designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to collect and pay out digital audio mechanical royalties to independent songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, publishing administrators, and collective management organizations (CMOs) pursuant to the Music Modernization Act of 2018.
These "songwriter royalties" are paid to The MLC by digital service providers such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, SoundCloud, Tidal, and many others when your songs are streamed or downloaded in the United States. We then pay out 100% of these monies to our members. And membership is free!
Every month, dozens of digital music services report streams and downloads of sound recordings to The MLC. We then try to match those sound recording to the songs that have been registered with us by our members (all songs are searchable in our The MLC's Public Work Search) so that we can pay out the digital audio mechanical royalties to the correct songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, publishing administrators or foriegn collective management organization. When we are unable to match a sound recording to songs registered in our database, the sound recording becomes classified as an unmatched recording and the associated digital audio mechanical royalties are held at The MLC.
This Artist Lookup enables songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music producers to search for your name to see if The MLC may have royalties on hold for songs that you wrote or composed, which have been streamed or downloaded on digital music services in the United States.
If your artist name appears in the search results, then you can submit a request to schedule a meeting with a DURP representative to review your sound recordings to determine if you may be eligible to become a member of The MLC to register your songs and unlock any accrued unpaid royalties. If your name appears multiple times, this simply means that we may have multiple unmatched recordings for you. You do not need to request multiple meetings. Select Request A Meeting only once.
If your name does not appear in the search results, then we do not have enough information in the DURP dataset to identify unmatched recordings. However, you should search for your songs on our Public Search. If your song is not registered and listed there, then there may be unmatched recordings for you and you should consult your publisher or look into MLC membership if you are a self-administered songwriter, composer, or lyricist.