Doubly Blackbox Checker | Find your unclaimed MLC royalties<br>Blackbox Checker
See which of your recordings are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC,<br>and roughly what that's costing you.
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What to do next
Every step happens at The MLC, not here. All of it is free, and you can<br>do it yourself as a self-administered writer if you don't have a<br>publisher.
✓Looks good<br>Linked to a work at the MLC with every share claimed. Nothing to do here.
◈Needs matching<br>Your registration is fine and your shares are fine. What is missing is the link between this recording and the work, for the submissions that arrived without one, so the money has nowhere to go even though the paperwork is correct.<br>1.<br>Use the MLC's Matching Tool to link this recording's ISRC to the work it already belongs to. MLC Portal ↗
◐Partially claimed<br>The work is on file at the MLC, but the splits don't add up to 100%. This is not always wrong. If you wrote with other people, the unclaimed slice may simply be their share.<br>1.<br>Check the shares on the work match what you actually own. Search the MLC ↗
2.<br>If the unclaimed part is your own share, which happens when a co-writer registered the work without you, claim it with the MLC's Claiming Tool. MLC Portal ↗
○Fully unclaimed<br>The work is on file at the MLC and nobody has claimed any shares, so they don't know who to pay.<br>1.<br>Confirm the work is registered with the MLC. Search the MLC ↗
2.<br>Claim your shares with the MLC's Claiming Tool. MLC Portal ↗
✕Unmatched<br>The MLC has the recording and the money, but no link between the recording and a work, so there is nothing for them to pay it against.<br>1.<br>Confirm the work is registered with the MLC. Search the MLC ↗
2.<br>Use the MLC's Matching Tool to link the recording's ISRC to your work. MLC Portal ↗
–Not in MLC data<br>Usually a recent release the services haven't reported yet. This is the one state you can get ahead of: register now and the money has somewhere to land the day it arrives.<br>1.<br>Register the work with the MLC. Get started ↗
2.<br>Link the recording to it by ISRC, so the match is waiting when the usage lands. MLC Portal ↗
3.<br>Check back here in a month or two to confirm it lined up.
Questions<br>What is “black box” money?<br>Every stream generates two royalties. One is for the recording, the other for the work underneath it, meaning the composition. In the US that second one is collected by The Mechanical Licensing Collective, a non-profit set up under the Music Modernization Act to pay mechanical royalties to songwriters.<br>When they cannot match a recording to its work, or the work has shares nobody has claimed, the money still comes in. It just never goes out. It sits in an unallocated pool the industry calls the black box. This tool shows you how much of your catalog is stuck there.
Why is this money at risk, and how did you work out the number?<br>Because it does not sit at The MLC forever. Starting in early 2027 they begin distributing accrued royalties that were never matched or claimed, by market share, splitting them among the publishers and writers already collecting in proportion to what they already earn.<br>There is no deadline to beat. Claiming and matching stay open indefinitely, and anything you fix now protects every month not yet distributed. But each month that passes with your name missing from a recording is a month of its royalties paid to somebody else. The MLC's own explanation ↗<br>How we size it. We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate. Then we apply only the unclaimed percentage of each work.<br>The per-stream rate is measured from MLC distributions and historical CRB Phonorecords rates. We checked it against catalogs we administer, where the rate implied by actual payments came out around half the headline figure, so we use the measured one instead.<br>The MLC also publishes its own ranking of what each unmatched recording is worth, and we read that too. Where their figure is larger than ours, we use theirs. We never add the two together, because they are two estimates of the same money rather than two piles of it. This mostly shows up on quieter recordings, where a handful of streams tells us very little and The MLC is holding real money anyway, and on recordings we have no stream count for at all.<br>It is a range rather than a single number, give or take 35%, because every other input is an industry average rather than something we measured for you. A trailing plus sign means the top of the range is open-ended: The MLC's highest band has no ceiling, so we cannot name one either. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not an invoice.
My song is registered and fully claimed. Why does it say “Needs matching”?<br>Because the registration is only half of what has to be right. The other half is the link between that work and each...