Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours
Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists: When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons,…
In plain words
Blackbox Checker helps musicians identify which of their recorded songs are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC, the nonprofit that collects mechanical royalties from streaming platforms. Users paste a Spotify link to see which recordings are missing from The MLC's system and estimate potential lost earnings. The tool addresses a significant problem: The MLC currently holds over $656 million in unclaimed royalties that will be distributed to already-registered publishers if not claimed by January 2027, making registration urgent for independent artists and songwriters.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Paste a Spotify link and see which of your recordings are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC, and roughly what that
See which of your recordings are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC, and roughly what that's costing you. The MLC is holding $656M nobody has claimed. The first $6.41M of it, from January 2021, gets paid out to market share in The MLC's own figure for the oldest usage month still unmatched or unclaimed. It goes to the publishers and writers already collecting, in proportion to what they already collect, and once it has gone out it is gone. None of it reaches you unless your name is on the work. The MLC has said it starts in January 2027, and their January distribution date is the 14th, so that is where the clock runs. Linked to a work at the MLC with every share claimed. Nothing to do…from pub.doub.ly
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists: When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box". That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers. This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January. Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027. That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywall, the reports are completely actionable without needing anything from us. The tool: paste a Spotify artist link (or search for a Spotify artist by name). It pulls every release on that profile, checks each recording against The MLC's public bulk data, and tells you per-song whether it's fully claimed, partially claimed, registered but unmatched, or missing entirely. It then provides a link to the exact MLC tool that fixes each case. It also estimates the dollars stuck, as a rough range. Even if you're not an artist yourself, you probably know someone who is a musician, please share it with them. Thanks for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions about the industry as a whole, The MLC, the tech, anything really.
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