The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) has been awarded Music Business Association’s Impact Award for Technological Excellence at the third annual Bizzy Awards on Wednesday, May 15 as part of the Music Biz 2024 conference in Nashville, TN.
The Impact Award for Technological Excellence recognizes a company or individual that is at the forefront of innovation in the music business, by providing solutions to meet the needs of the modern industry or pioneering the ways it will operate in the future. This year, The MLC’s total royalties distributed exceeded $2 billion in U.S. streaming royalties since the first royalty distribution in April 2021. Since then, The MLC has continued to distribute monthly royalty distributions, all of which have been on time or early, and grown its membership to over 40,000 Members.
The MLC’s Head of Third-Party Partnerships, Dae Bogan, was also awarded the Maestro of Metadata Award, which is presented to a company or executive who has made a significant impact in the area of data processing, credit clarification, streamlining or otherwise promoting clean data and best practices.
Bogan played a pivotal role in launching The MLC’s Distributor Unmatched Recordings Portal (DURP), a data portal developed in collaboration with seven prominent independent music distributors, which has helped identify and distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties to music creators globally. The DURP, which now includes over 70 distributors, aggregators and other eligible sound recording distributors, allows distributors to see the publicly available data The MLC has compiled for unmatched royalties that relate to streams of sound recordings they have distributed. This transparency enables them to work with their customers to register their songs with The MLC and claim any unmatched royalties for their songs that The MLC has accrued.
The MLC has also effectively illuminated the “black box” for digital audio mechanicals by giving members the ability to search all the unmatched data and propose matches for their works using The MLC’s Matching Tool. To date, The MLC has received and approved more than 1 million proposed matches submitted by members through the Matching Tool. Additionally, The MLC has nearly 36 million works in its public database, which allows anyone to search The MLC’s song ownership database free of charge.
For more information about The MLC, visit www.themlc.com.
