Starting in April, music publishing companies will be handed a total of roughly $7 million every month — and not for any of the business they’ve done. It’s the result of a process mandated by 2018’s Music Modernization Act (MMA), and the biggest publishers will stand to take home the most money. Here’s how this little-understood process will work.
Since the beginning of the streaming era, hundreds of millions of dollars in songwriter royalties have been accrued from streaming services in the U.S. that — for one reason or another — have never found their rightful home. Often, it happens because independent songwriters drop music by themselves, and since this group has little industry guidance, they may not provide all the proper information required to receive their payments. Other times, it can be as simple as a clerical error by a well-known, well-represented musician.
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As time progressed, this pool, sometimes referred to as “black box money” or more officially as “unmatched” or “unclaimed” royalties, accumulated with nowhere for it to go. Despite efforts to find the owners, some of these talents were unreachable.
In response to this growing issue, the Music Modernization Act (2018), one of the most monumental pieces of music legislation to become U.S. law in recent history, mandated a system for eventually getting rid of this stagnant pool and distributing it back into the music industry ecosystem.
The MMA also set forth the guidelines for the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), a middleman between the streaming service and the songwriter or publisher that would collect this form of royalty. As stated by Congress, the MLC has to try to match the black box money with its rightful owners for at least three years. In cases where that can’t be done, the MLC has the authorization “to distribute the unclaimed royalties to copyright owners identified in the MLC records, based on the relative market shares of such copyright owners,” as the MMA states.
Now, as the MLC announced last week, the organization is ready to begin its first-ever market share distribution. This will happen in a piecemeal fashion, month by month, starting in April, when publishers will receive their share of about $7 million — which is the current amount of black box money for the month of January 2021, the first month the MLC was in operation. (Note: the MLC will continue to try to match that money, so this figure may go down before April.) According to the MLC, this will continue with distributions on a monthly basis, with the amount of money each month expected to be “comparable” to the January 2021 figure. That means by the end of 2027, music publishers will collectively receive roughly $70 million in total. It is not required that they share this money with their songwriters.
It’s unclear exactly what the market share is for music’s top publishers. According to an MLC spokesperson, “the calculation is based on the usage data we receive from each service for its U.S. offerings, along with our own distribution data for the royalties related to that usage. We will use that data to allocate the remaining royalties on a pro rata basis for each DSP and offering, rather than relying on estimates of a publisher’s overall global market share.”
Still, Billboard tabulates the publishers’ market shares every quarter for specific charts like the Billboard Hot 100 and the Top Radio Airplay tallies, called Publishers’ Quarterly, which can provide some insight into their relative sizes. As of Q2 2026, Sony Music Publishing was number 1 on both charts by a wide margin, notching the highest market share ever recorded in Publishers’ Quarterly history on the Hot 100 with 37.32%. Warner Chappell came in second on the Hot 100 with 17.67%, UMPG held 12.45% and Kobalt had 9.38%.
There is, however, another pot of black box money that the MLC is still attempting to match and distribute. Called “historical unclaimed royalties,” this is the pool of $397 million that accumulated in the years 2007-2020, before the MLC was established, making it even more challenging to reconcile so many years later. Since receiving the original $397 million, the MLC has matched $317 million and distributed $239 million (over 60%).
“Once the process for distributions of remaining blanket royalties has been successfully launched, we will look to begin processing the remaining historical royalties,” the MLC says on its website. There is no timeline provided, but the organization claims it will share more information when it gets closer to the start of those distributions.
The MLC market share distribution system has come under some scrutiny, with some in the industry saying it represents the best solution to a nearly impossible problem, and others arguing that it unfairly benefits the biggest publishers and does not bring songwriters into the fold. Most agree, however, that in an era of increasing volume and few gatekeepers, it’s at least important to get that money flowing again.
The move to begin market share distributions comes just nine months after the MLC’s first five-year review. The review is required by the MMA to ensure the MLC is doing an adequate job matching and distributing royalties. While some stakeholders, like the streaming services and independent songwriters, had suggestions for how the MLC could improve, those involved in the review, called the “redesignation,” gave the MLC largely positive reviews, and thus, the MLC was granted the ability to operate for an additional five years.
