I hope this finds all of you enjoying summer so far. July 1st marked 18 months since The MLC officially began operations and the midway point in our second full year of operations. A lot has happened since our last issue of the Quarter Note.
With the completion of our July monthly royalty distribution — The MLC’s 16th overall — we have now distributed more than $580 million in blanket royalties to our Members, and each of those 16 distributions has been completed on time or ahead of schedule. Additionally, our initial match rates — the percentage of royalties sent to us by DSPs that we have matched to musical works in our database — have continued to improve. Our initial match rate exceeded 85 percent for the first time in our May distribution, and our initial match rates for the June and July distributions were also above 85 percent.
The MLC also achieved two important milestones related to the historical unmatched royalties: we began distributing our first set of matched historical royalties in our June distribution, and we began making the data for the remaining unmatched historical uses available for Members to search in our Matching Tool. We share more details about these two milestones in this newsletter.
Finally, a number of in-person industry events were held this spring, many for the first time since the pandemic began. The MLC was excited to be able to participate in several of these events, including the Key West Songwriters Festival, Music Biz 2022 here in Nashville, the annual Folk Alliance International conference in Kansas City, and several events in New York City as part of “Songwriters Week.” Attending these events enabled us to continue to spread the word about The MLC to prospective Members, while meeting existing Members in person for the first time.
On behalf of the entire team at The MLC, thank you for your interest in the work we do and for your continued support.
Kris Ahrend
