Picture this: months of recording, an upload to your distributor, and streams ticking up steadily. Your PRO sends a quarterly statement. You cash it. But there's a second payment that never arrives, not because you didn't earn it, but because you never set up the account to receive it.

Most self-releasing musicians don't know there's a separate payment system for the mechanical side of U.S. digital streams. It doesn't show up on your DSP dashboard, your PRO won't mention it, and nothing breaks if you ignore it, except that money you earned goes somewhere else.

What The MLC is

According to themlc.com and aristake.com, The MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) is the only organization legally authorized to issue blanket mechanical licenses to streaming services and collect mechanical royalties from digital audio uses in the United States. It came out of the Music Modernization Act and handles blanket licenses covering all eligible streaming and download services, then distributes payments to self-administered songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, and collective management organizations.

The blanket structure means services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music pay a single license to The MLC covering every composition they use. The MLC then distributes those funds to whoever has registered the rights. No registration means the money pools up in an unmatched account, waiting.

Two separate royalty streams from a single stream

Mechanical royalties and performance royalties are distinct, paid by different systems. Performance royalties cover the public performance or broadcast of a composition and flow through PROs such as ASCAP or BMI. According to artists.spotify.com and aristake.com, mechanical royalties for U.S. digital audio uses are not collected by PROs at all. That's The MLC's territory.

A streaming play technically triggers both. The platform reproduces the composition (mechanical) and publicly performs it (performance), generating two separate royalties, paid on separate schedules, through separate organizations.

Why a PRO membership alone does not cover this

Most independent musicians assume that joining ASCAP or BMI handles royalty collection across the board. That assumption is wrong, and it costs real money over time.

According to artists.spotify.com, songwriters cannot collect mechanical royalties by being a member of a PRO, and they cannot collect performance royalties by joining The MLC. The two systems don't overlap. A songwriter who has been a BMI member for three years and never registered with The MLC has left half their U.S. streaming royalties uncollected the entire time.

The scale of unclaimed royalties

According to artists.spotify.com, The MLC received $424 million in historical unmatched and unclaimed royalties from the period before its launch. A significant portion of that figure is believed to come from independent songwriters who had never registered their works.

That's money that was collected, held, and couldn't be distributed because no registration existed to match against the streams. Some of those royalties are still in the database. The MLC has search tools that let you check whether your works are registered and whether there's unclaimed money attached to your catalog. It takes maybe ten minutes to find out.

How to register, and what it costs

Independent songwriters register directly at themlc.com. According to chartlex.com, there is no fee to join as an independent songwriter. No sign-up cost, no annual membership, no percentage taken from what you're paid.

According to aristake.com, registering songs is essential because unregistered works don't generate any payments even as streams accumulate. You'll submit work details: title, writer shares, publisher information, and an ISWC code if you have one. Songs that are actively streaming should be registered promptly, since retroactive claims have limits depending on the timeframe.

Once you're registered, you can also search the database to see whether you already have unclaimed money on file from before you signed up.

Mechanical royalties versus recording royalties

Mechanical royalties go to the songwriter or publisher who owns the composition, not necessarily the person who recorded the track. Recording royalties from streaming go to whoever owns the master. According to aristake.com, streaming revenue on the recording side is generally far greater than the mechanical royalties paid to songwriters, which reflects how the pro-rata model weights master ownership.

These aren't competing streams. They go to different rights holders for different things. If you wrote the song and own the master recording, you may be entitled to both, but each requires its own separate registration with a separate organization.

International mechanical royalties

The MLC covers U.S. digital audio only. For streams outside the United States, you need to look to local organizations, most of which run their own mechanical collection systems with separate registration requirements. According to aristake.com and chartlex.com, a publishing administrator significantly simplifies international collection and typically catches royalties that would otherwise be missed.

If you're getting meaningful streams in multiple territories, a publishing administrator like SongTrust or CD Baby Pro may be worth the fee for the international coverage alone, even if you handle U.S. mechanicals through The MLC directly. The math depends on your volume, but working through a single administrator beats navigating each country's system on your own.

Related reading

For the performance royalty side of this, see PRO royalty collection for independent artists. If you want to understand the full royalty lifecycle from a single stream, the streaming payout problem breaks down the pro-rata model and what your DSP dashboard isn't telling you. And if you're still sorting out which rights you own and which you've signed away, self-releasing without losing rights covers that ground.

Sources and further reading