The Money That Waits Three Years

"Just put it through Songtrust and forget about it." You just watched that advice priced against two catalogues, and the figure between them sits in your streaming dashboard.

Mechanical royalties are the reproduction money on a composition, owed every time a song is streamed or downloaded on a licensed US service. The Mechanical Licensing Collective has collected them since January 2021, membership costs nothing, and a songwriter with no deal joins as self-administered.

So this lesson walks a registration screen, separates the two words the system runs on, and prices its one decision.

Free, and mostly unopened

Roughly $160 million of pre-2021 US mechanical royalties was still unmatched in 2026, from a pool the streaming services handed over in 2021.

Money keeps arriving whether or not anybody has claimed it. The account that would receive it is the thing nobody creates: an afternoon of work that pays nothing back.

What a work registration needs

Registration happens one song at a time in the member portal, and the form is shorter than its reputation. Only the work title is required. A registration carrying nothing else matches nothing.

• The work title, plus alternates for language versions, live versions or remixes with identical writers.

• Every writer by legal name with their IPI, plus a composer or author role.

• The publisher, the party with a direct relationship to the songwriter, with a collection share between 0.01 and 100.

• The recording, where the ISRC lives. That field is what lets a reported stream find the song you registered.

Skip the recording step and nothing can ever arrive against that entry.

Unmatched, or unclaimed

Two failures look identical on a statement. They are repaired in different places. Unmatched means the reported use could not be tied to a registered work. Unclaimed means the work is known and a slice has nobody claiming it.

As of March 2026, $253.3 million sat unmatched and $203.8 million unclaimed from 2021 to 2024 usage alone. Two piles, two causes, and a co-writer creates the smaller one.

Your half pays out on schedule. Theirs waits, and none of it comes to you for doing the paperwork. Co-writers who administer themselves join separately and register their own share.

Three years, then market share

Royalties from usage on or after 1 January 2021 are held for a minimum of three years while the collective looks for the owner, and the interest travels with the money. What is left goes to publishers and self-administered songwriters on a market share formula, so it ends up with the publishers who already hold large catalogues.

The number that decides it

A publishing administrator registers your compositions worldwide, collects the publisher share and pays it through, less commission. Direct registration at The MLC covers US mechanicals for nothing.

One figure separates those four rows: the share of your listening happening outside the United States. On US-only listening a commission lands on money The MLC would have paid you for free. On heavy non-US listening it becomes 80 per cent of something against nothing. So which of your last three releases has an audience outside the US?