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Royalties

Is Registering With the MLC Worth It for a Small Artist?

By Boboy Watson·Last verified August 31, 2026·2,013 words·Royalties

I get some version of this question constantly: my numbers are small, is the paperwork actually worth it?

For The MLC specifically, the honest answer is that the question does not really apply, because the cost side of the trade is zero. Registration is free. It takes about twenty minutes. There is no ongoing fee and nobody takes a percentage. The only thing you spend is one evening you were going to spend scrolling anyway.

What does The MLC actually collect?

The MLC — the Mechanical Licensing Collective — collects mechanical royalties on the composition for US on-demand streams and downloads. It was designated under the Music Modernization Act to administer the Section 115 blanket licence, which is the compulsory licence that lets Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and every other interactive service reproduce your song without negotiating with you individually.

That is a specific, narrow thing, and the narrowness is the point. It is not the money DistroKid pays you — that is the sound recording royalty. It is not the money ASCAP or BMI pays you — that is the performance royalty. It is a fourth stream that, in the United States, has exactly one collector, and that collector requires you to register.

If you have never registered a work with The MLC, then for every US on-demand stream you have ever had, the mechanical royalty on your composition has gone unclaimed.

How much does it cost to join The MLC?

Nothing. There is no membership fee, no annual subscription, and no commission deducted from what The MLC collects. This is unlike ASCAP, which charges a $50 one-time processing fee for a writer account and another $50 for a publisher account, and unlike a publishing administrator such as Songtrust, which is priced as a percentage of what it collects.

The MLC is funded by the digital services under the Music Modernization Act rather than by songwriters. That funding structure is the reason the answer to "is it worth it" is trivially yes.

What are the MLC payout minimums and when do you get paid?

Pick ACH. This is the single most consequential setting in the whole account. At a $5 threshold you get paid almost immediately; at the $100 check threshold a small catalogue can wait years to cross the line, and in the meantime the money simply sits in your MLC balance doing nothing.

The timing rule is clean: about 75 days after the end of the monthly usage period. January usage pays around mid-April, February around mid-May, and so on. If a month goes by with no payment notification, the usual explanation is that you were under the minimum, not that nothing was earned.

What is the difference between The MLC, your PRO and SoundExchange?

This is the comparison that clears up most of the confusion, because all three are free or cheap, all three are US collection bodies, and none of them substitutes for the others.

Read across the top row. The MLC and your PRO both cover the composition, but different rights. SoundExchange covers a completely different copyright. There is no overlap, which is exactly why you need all three accounts.

Does my distributor already register me with The MLC?

Not through basic distribution. DistroKid Musician at $24.99/yr, TuneCore Rising Artist at $24.99/yr and CD Baby at $9.99 per single are all sound recording distribution products.

DistroKid does sell DistroKid Publishing as a separate paid add-on, and it does collect global digital mechanicals. DistroKid's own wording is that this income is different from your usual streaming royalties, which DistroKid already collects for all members. CD Baby sells a comparable mechanicals product. Songtrust does this as its core business. All of them take a percentage.

If you have bought one of those products, it is registering your works and you should not also register the same works yourself — duplicate claims create conflicts that take months to unwind. If you have not, nobody is doing it.

Worked example: what the $5 threshold actually changes

Assume a modest catalogue generating a few dollars a month in US mechanicals. Take a single usage month that produces $6.10.

With ACH selected, that $6.10 clears the $5 minimum and is paid out about 75 days after the month ends. Repeat that across a year and roughly $73 reaches your bank account in twelve payments.

With physical check selected, the same $6.10 does not clear the $100 minimum. Neither does the next month, or the one after. At roughly $6 a month you cross $100 somewhere in year two, and until then the balance sits at The MLC. The money is not lost — it is yours and it accumulates — but you have chosen to be paid once every seventeen months instead of every month, for no reason other than a dropdown you did not read.

Nothing about the earning changed in that example. Only the payment method did.

The unmatched royalty pool

The number attached to this is $424 million, and it is almost always quoted wrongly. Approximately $424 million was the accrued historical unmatched mechanical royalty money that the digital services transferred to The MLC when it launched in 2021 — years of earlier US streaming usage that was never matched to a copyright owner. It was a one-time transfer of a backlog, not a pot of money sitting at The MLC right now, and The MLC has since matched and distributed a substantial portion of it.

So do not register because you think there is a pile with your name near it. Register because unmatched royalties are a continuous leak rather than a jackpot: every usage month, US on-demand streams generate mechanical royalties, and every usage month the share that does not match a registered composition goes unmatched. The system is not designed to find you. It is designed to hold money until somebody claims it, and after a statutory holding period, undistributed royalties are allocated to publishers by market share. Being small does not exclude you from that pool; it just means your unclaimed share is smaller.

Being unregistered does not mean you are not earning. It means you are earning into a pile you cannot reach.

Where "small artist" logic actually breaks down

The instinct to skip paperwork when the numbers are small makes sense for anything with a cost. It does not make sense here, for three reasons.

Registration is partly retroactive, but not fully. Getting registered now lets you pursue historical usage through The MLC's claiming process, but that process has limits and is materially more work than registering upfront. Every month you wait makes the cleanup bigger.

You are registering a catalogue, not a song. The twenty minutes is mostly account setup. Adding works after that is fast, and bulk registration exists. Doing it at three songs is dramatically easier than doing it at forty.

Your numbers might not stay small. If one song catches — a sync placement, a playlist add, a video that moves — the difference between registered and unregistered is the difference between collecting and watching. Registration is not something you can do quickly in the week it happens.

What to have ready before you start

Registration goes faster if you gather this first.

1. Your legal name, address and tax details.
2. Your PRO affiliation and member number from ASCAP or BMI, if you have one — set that up first if you can.
3. Your publisher entity name and its PRO number, if you self-publish.
4. A list of your released songs with their ISRCs, which your distributor holds, and the writer splits for each.
5. Bank details for ACH direct deposit, so you land on the $5 threshold rather than the $100 one.

Then register as both a writer and, if you self-publish, a publisher. Same pattern as ASCAP and BMI: the writer half and the publisher half are separate claims, and registering only one leaves the other unclaimed.

What is Section 115, and why does it mean you have to register?

Section 115 of the US Copyright Act is the compulsory mechanical licence. It says that once a composition has been distributed to the public, anyone else may reproduce it without your permission, provided they pay the statutory royalty. It is the reason cover songs are legal without a negotiation, and it is the reason Spotify does not have to call you before adding your song.

The Music Modernization Act of 2018 extended Section 115 into a blanket licence for interactive streaming and created The MLC to administer it. Digital services pay into the blanket licence; The MLC matches that usage to registered compositions and pays the writers and publishers.

The consequence for you is structural rather than optional. Because the licence is compulsory, the money is generated whether or not you have ever heard of The MLC. Because matching depends on a registered work record, the money only reaches you if a record exists. Section 115 is why nobody asks your permission, and MLC registration is why anybody knows where to send the payment.

Should I use The MLC directly or a publishing administrator?

Both, eventually, and it is worth understanding what each one is actually selling.

The MLC covers US mechanicals, costs nothing, and takes no commission. For a self-releasing artist whose audience is mostly American, direct registration with The MLC captures the large majority of the mechanical income that exists.

A publishing administrator — Songtrust, DistroKid Publishing, CD Baby's publishing product, TuneCore's — registers you with collection societies in dozens of territories, handles foreign mechanicals and foreign performance income, chases sync, and takes a percentage of everything it collects. That percentage is the product. The value is real if your listeners are spread across Europe, Latin America and Asia, where you would otherwise need relationships with a long list of societies.

The mistake is treating them as alternatives and paying an administrator to do the free US part. The mistake in the other direction is assuming that registering directly with The MLC collects your foreign mechanicals, which it does not.

If you do sign with an administrator, do not also hold your own direct MLC registrations for the same works. Overlapping claims on one composition create conflicts, and conflicts freeze payment on the disputed share until somebody resolves them.

What The MLC does not do

The MLC covers US mechanical usage. That is it.

It does not collect your performance royalties — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR do that. It does not collect the digital performance royalty on your sound recording — SoundExchange does that. It does not collect internationally; foreign mechanicals go through foreign societies or a publishing administrator. It does not register your copyright with the US Copyright Office, which is a separate $45 to $85 filing. And it does not replace your distributor.

So registering with The MLC does not mean you are done. It means one of four pots is now connected to your bank account, at a cost of zero dollars and twenty minutes.

I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer or an accountant. Fees and thresholds change — verify them at the source before you rely on them.