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 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, and lyricists 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 service providers report audio streams and digital downloads of sound recordings to The MLC. We then try to match these sound recordings to musical works ("songs") that have been registered with us (these songs are searchable in our Public Search) so that we can route any digital audio mechanical royalties to the right songwriters, composers, lyricists, music publishers, and publishing administrators. When we are unable to match a sound recording to songs registered with us, the sound recording becomes classified as an unmatched recording and the digital audio mechanical royalties that are earned for the songs are held at The MLC. This Artist Lookup enables artists to search themselves within a selection of The MLC's unmatched recordings (a more complete database is accessible to The MLC members).
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.