Some of your artists’ royalties are being paid to someone else.

In the US, every song has to be registered in one central database, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (or MLC), which decides who gets paid each time that song is streamed. (This is about the underlying song, the melody and words, not any single recording of it.)

Sometimes the same song ends up registered twice: once by you, and once by a different publisher listed as the owner. When that happens, the other registration can be the one collecting the money, even though the rights are yours. This is the most serious finding, because it usually means real royalties are landing in someone else’s account right now.

The MLC’s own remedy is to merge duplicate registrations into one, but only when the two agree about who owns what. When they disagree, which is the case here, it becomes an ownership conflict: you raise it with the MLC, it holds the contested share, and you and the other party (or, if it comes to it, a court) settle who’s owed what. The MLC won’t decide ownership itself.

What makes acting quickly matter is that the hold only works going forward. Once you flag the conflict and back up your claim, royalties are held from that point on, but the MLC doesn’t claw back whatever the other publisher already collected; that money becomes yours to recover from them directly. So every payout cycle you wait is harder to get back. The fix is to flag the competing registration with both song codes, establish your ownership, and get the two registrations merged or the shares corrected.

When a song is registered, everyone’s ownership is meant to add up to 100%. Very often it doesn’t. A slice is left with nobody’s name on it.

That open slice still earns money every time the song is streamed, but with no one claiming it, the money just piles up in a holding account. The good news: if any of it is rightfully yours, claiming it doesn’t only switch on future payments. The MLC pays out everything that share has accrued since 2021, with interest. The catch is timing. Starting in 2027, the MLC begins handing the oldest unclaimed money to other publishers by market share instead (biggest companies first, one month at a time), so a slice left unclaimed too long is eventually lost to them.

A song and a recording of it are two different things here. One song can have many recordings (the original, a clean edit, a sped-up version, a live take), and each recording carries its own ID code (called an ISRC).

For the money to flow, every recording has to be “linked” to the song it belongs to. When some aren’t, the plays from those versions never get matched to the song, so the royalties they earn never reach you. It’s a plumbing problem, not an ownership dispute. The fix is simply connecting the loose recordings to the right song. And because these royalties are held rather than lost, once the link is made you’re paid what those streams have already earned (back to 2021, with interest), not just what they earn from then on.

These are the lower-confidence findings. They’re real and worth checking, but unlike the categories above they don’t automatically mean money is waiting for you.

A few examples: a songwriter credited on a track but listed at 0% while other companies hold all of it; a song missing its international ID code (the ISWC), which doesn’t block US payment but is worth tidying up; or a registration you’re not named on where it isn’t clear anyone else is wrongly claiming it. We flag these separately, and honestly, so you can decide with your own eyes what’s worth acting on, rather than dressing them up as guaranteed recoveries.