Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) announced today that it has received a total of $ 424,384,787 in licensing fees from all music streaming services, which include Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music. Apple was responsible for $ 163,338,890 – which is the highest amount paid by all companies.
MLC calls this “accumulated historical unmatched royalties from digital service providers.” For those unfamiliar, MLC is a non-profit organization designated by the US Copyright Office according to the Music Modernization Act of 2018. The royalties come from 20 different suppliers, called DSPs.
Among all the DSPs that contributed to the MLC, Apple was the company that paid the highest music licensing fee thanks to Apple Music. Spotify comes soon after with $ 152,226,039 paid and Amazon comes in third place with $ 42,741,507 paid. The list also includes other services, such as YouTube, Pandora and SoundCloud.
The transfer of these funds represents the culmination of a months-long effort by the MLC and these DSPs to develop and implement the specifications for these usage reports. With these unparalleled historical royalties and usage reports now in hand, MLC can begin the process of reviewing and analyzing the data to find and pay for the appropriate copyright owners.
As explained by Variety, MLC began administering licenses for qualified streaming services in the United States in January 2021. The organization now collects royalties from DSPs and pays composers, songwriters and other professionals involved in the project.
On January 1, MLC officially began administering a new general license covering musical works available on digital audio services in the United States. Before MMA made this general licensing system possible (for U.S. DSPs to distribute permanent downloads, limited downloads and interactive streams), a music-by-music licensing framework was in place. With countless songs on dozens of platforms, it was virtually impossible to license all uses of all music, let alone deliver royalties to rights holders in a timely manner
You can find more details about the royalty fees for the song on the official MLC website.
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