FAQ on Mechanical Royalties from the U.S.

Answers to your questions about the Mechanical Licensing Collective

Since our last article about mechanical royalties from the U.S. we received a lot of questions about registering with MLC. Here are answers to your most burning questions.

  • If you are the original composer and have not registered your works with a collecting society.
  • If you distribute third party compositions that are not registered with a collecting society and you would like to take care of the reimbursement to the originators.
  • If it’s a cover version of another song
  • If your works are already registered with a collecting society
  • If you have a publisher who takes care of it
  • If you (or your publisher) have already registered your works with MLC

You can register directly in your MES when creating a new product. In “track data” you will find “publishing rights”. There you can either choose “MLC registration” or “MLC opt-out”. Select the first one, if you want to register with MLC.

Already released products can only be registered via a metadata update at the moment. We are currently working on a solution that will make this easier for you and avoid additional costs.

For new products, publishing rights are a mandatory field, so you will need to either select “MLC registration” or “MLC opt-out”. Already released products are automatically set to “ MLC opt-out”.