MLC Redesignated 2026: What It Means for Your Royalties

If you write songs, publish your own music, or produce for other artists, there's a good chance the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) owes you money right now. In 2026 the U.S. government looked hard at whether the MLC deserves to keep running, and the answer was yes. That's good news for the system, but it doesn't mean your money is automatically landing in your account.

This post breaks down the MLC redesignation in plain English: what happened, what the Copyright Office actually said, what it means for songwriters and small publishers, and the short list of things you should do this month. If you've been meaning to check your catalog, this is a good excuse.

What Is MLC Redesignation, and Why Did It Happen?

When Congress passed the Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2018, it created a single nonprofit to collect and distribute digital mechanical royalties from streaming and download services in the U.S. That's the MLC. The Register of Copyrights picked it in July 2019, and it started paying out in 2021.

The law doesn't hand the MLC a permanent job, though. The Copyright Office has to run a periodic review to check whether the MLC still meets the statutory criteria. If it does, the Office "redesignates" it for another term.

That first review began in January 2024. The MLC filed an operations report that April, the Office collected more than 60 public comments, and the MLC made its final submission in July 2024. The Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, signed the rule on May 29, 2026, and it was published in the Federal Register on June 3, 2026.

The verdict: the MLC "continues to meet each of its statutory criteria for redesignation." The Digital Licensee Coordinator (the DLC), the nonprofit that represents streaming services in the system, was redesignated too. The next periodic review is expected to start in January 2029.

What the Copyright Office Actually Said

Headlines tend to flatten this into "MLC wins." The details are more useful.

• No formal conditions were imposed. The Office didn't put the MLC on probation or attach requirements to the renewal.
• It did make recommendations. They cover improving database tools, disclosing match-rate data, and being more transparent about how the MLC invests the money it holds.
• It called the royalties significant. The Office described MLC payments as "a reliable and significant income source for songwriters and publishers."

Read that middle bullet again. Match rates and investment practices are exactly the areas where indie creators have been asking questions for years. The Office is nudging the MLC to show its work, and that's something you can use as leverage when you're deciding how much to trust any single system with your money.

The MLC at Five Years: The Numbers

The MLC held its annual membership meeting on September 29, 2026, and gave a five-year snapshot. Here are the headline figures reported from that meeting:

Those are big numbers, and they're a real sign the system works for people who are registered. But look at the match rate. A 92% match rate sounds great until you realize the other 8% is still real money tied to real songs that nobody has connected to an owner. If your songs live in that gap, the average doesn't help you.

What Redesignation Means for Indie Songwriters

Your registration work isn't wasted

The uncertainty is gone. If you registered your works with the MLC, you backed the right horse. If you've been putting it off because you weren't sure the MLC would stick around, that excuse just expired.

Nothing happens automatically

This is the part people get wrong. Redesignation keeps the MLC running. It doesn't register your songs, match your recordings, or send you a check. The MLC can only pay what it can match to a registered owner. Your PRO membership doesn't cover this, and neither does your distributor. Mechanical royalties for streaming are a separate stream and a separate registration.

Transparency is improving, slowly

The Copyright Office's recommendations on match-rate disclosure and database tools mean you should expect better visibility over time. In the meantime, the MLC has launched a dashboard that tracks the remaining unclaimed accrued royalties from 2021 usage. Watch that kind of tool, because it shows how fast money is moving out of the pool.

The Money Clock: Market Share Distributions Start April 2027

Here's the part that makes redesignation news urgent for your catalog.

The MMA lets the MLC hold unclaimed royalties for a minimum of three years. After that, it can distribute them to members based on market share. The MLC says it will hold them for more than six years, double the statutory minimum. But the first distribution of this kind is scheduled to begin in April 2027, starting with January 2021 usage and then proceeding one usage month at a time.

Two terms to keep straight:

• Unmatched royalties are tied to recordings the MLC hasn't linked to a song in its database.
• Unclaimed royalties are tied to identified songs whose ownership shares haven't all been claimed by a Member.

The MLC reports that the pool for January 2021 usage was just over $6 million as of the September 2026 distribution, down from under $7 million in January 2026. That money shrinks as people claim it. Once a usage month is distributed, it's gone from the pool, and the people who weren't registered are the ones who miss out.

It's worth knowing what this does and doesn't cover. Historical unmatched royalties from 2007 to 2020 streaming are handled separately. The MLC has matched over $317 million of those and distributed about $238.72 million, and it has said it will announce timing for the rest later. Those are not part of the April 2027 start.

We've covered the mechanics of where unclaimed money ends up in our black box royalties guide. The short version: if you want a slice of what's sitting there, claim your works before the usage month that contains them gets distributed.

The 50% Rule Every Songwriter Should Know

This is the most underrated detail in the whole announcement. When the MLC distributes unclaimed money, publishers and administrators who receive it must pay or credit at least 50% of the songwriter's share to that songwriter, regardless of what the contract says.

If you work with a publisher or an administrator, that rule matters. It means a contract clause saying "we keep everything the MLC can't match" doesn't hold up for this money. If you're signed to someone, ask how they plan to handle unclaimed distributions and get the answer in writing. If you're not signed to anyone, you don't have to worry about this. You just need to be a Member yourself and claim your shares directly.

The Lawsuits Still Hanging Over the System

Redesignation didn't resolve everything. Two disputes are worth watching because they affect how much money flows through the MLC:

1. Spotify and the bundling reclassification. In May 2024 the MLC sued Spotify over its decision to reclassify Premium subscriptions as "bundles" after adding audiobook access, which lowers the mechanical royalties paid. The original claims were dismissed in January 2025, but the court allowed an amended complaint, and the case is ongoing.
2. Pandora and the "interactive" question. The MLC is also in a dispute with Pandora over whether its ad-supported radio tier qualifies as an interactive service, which determines which royalty rules apply.

Neither of these is resolved, so don't build your budget around an outcome. What you can do is make sure your works are registered, so that any money recovered gets matched to you instead of drifting into the pool. For the rate side of the story, see our Phonorecords V explainer.

Your 30-Minute MLC Checkup

You don't need a weekend for this. Block out half an hour and work through the list.

1. Confirm you're a Member. Log into the MLC Member Hub with the account you used to sign up. If you never registered as a songwriter or publisher member, do that first.
2. Search your own songs. Look up your top five earning titles in the public database. Check that the songwriter names, ownership shares, and ISWC (if one exists) are right.
3. Look for shares that don't add up to 100%. An unclaimed share is the most common reason money sits in the pool. If a co-writer hasn't registered, you can't fix their share, but you can tell them.
4. Match your recordings. Make sure each recording is linked to its work. Unmatched recordings are the other half of the pool.
5. Check your split sheets. If you can't remember who agreed to what, dig up the paperwork now. A conflicting claim is far easier to settle with a signed split sheet.
6. Write down your registration IDs. Keep a simple record of every song, its MLC work ID, and the date you registered it.

If you want the full catalog-wide version of this process, our catalog audit walk-through covers the PRO, MLC, and SoundExchange sides together.

Where RoyaltyCoPilot.ai Fits In

Checking five songs by hand is fine. Checking five hundred is a different job, and most independent catalogs are a mess of old titles, alternate spellings, and releases under different artist names. That's where gaps hide.

RoyaltyCoPilot.ai is built for exactly this. It audits your catalog against what the MLC, SoundExchange, and your PRO actually show, flags titles that look unregistered or mismatched, and gives you a prioritized list of what to fix first. You still own the claims and make the decisions. The tool just does the digging so you don't have to open forty browser tabs.

With the April 2027 market share distributions approaching, the sensible move is to run an audit now rather than in March. RoyaltyCoPilot.ai's free catalog audit is a quick way to see where you stand before the pool starts shrinking.

What to Expect Next

• April 2027: The first market share distribution of unclaimed accrued royalties begins, starting with January 2021 usage.
• Rolling after that: Each later usage month moves out of the holding pool in sequence.
• Later, TBA: Timing for processing historical unmatched royalties from 2007 to 2020.
• January 2029: The next expected periodic review of the MLC.
• Ongoing: The Spotify and Pandora disputes, plus whatever comes out of the Phonorecords V rate-setting process.

The Bottom Line

The MLC isn't going anywhere, and the Copyright Office has asked it to be more open about how it works. That's a positive development for the whole system. But the hard truth hasn't changed: the MLC pays people who show up. Registered songs get matched, and unregistered songs feed a pool that gets distributed to everyone else.

The cheapest royalty you'll ever collect is the one you already earned. Spend 30 minutes checking your registrations, fix what's broken, and if you've got a bigger catalog, let RoyaltyCoPilot.ai handle the heavy lifting. Your future self, scrolling through a statement in 2027, will thank you.

This article is for educational purposes and isn't legal advice. Figures reflect public reports as of fall 2026, so check the MLC's own materials for the latest numbers.