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How Far Back Can You Claim Unpaid Music Royalties? Every US Collector's Window

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 7, 2026·Getting paid

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Years ago I put out a song and a video called Puna Boy Anthem. It did numbers. And in the back of my mind the whole time was a nagging thought: I should register this somewhere. I knew the names — ASCAP, BMI. I had never heard of SoundExchange or The MLC. It took me six, maybe seven years to actually sign up for any of them.

So the question I eventually had to ask was the one this page answers: of the money my songs earned while I was not registered anywhere, how much can I still go and get? The honest answer is some of it, and which part depends entirely on which organisation was holding it, because every US collector runs its own clock. Below is each clock, read from each organisation's own published rules on 7 September 2026, US only.

I am an artist who lost real money to these windows, not a lawyer or an accountant. Where a rule is a direct quote from the collector it is marked as one.

Why is there a window at all?

Because the money was collected before anyone knew whose it was. A radio station, a bar, a webcaster or a streaming service paid a licence fee for a song that had no registered owner attached to it. The collector holds that money for a while, tries to match it, and eventually does something else with it — pays it to whoever asks within the rules, spreads it across its members, or releases it.

The four pots and their four different holding rules are the whole story:

The last row matters more than people think. If your only measure of "my royalties" is the distributor dashboard, you have been looking at the one pot that never had a deadline, and never at the four that did.

How far back does ASCAP pay?

ASCAP's help centre answers this in one sentence, and it is worth quoting exactly: "If there are surveyed performances of your music from a time before you registered it, ASCAP can retroactively credit you up to one survey year for missed royalties."

Three things are packed into that.

It is one survey year, not one calendar year, and not "as far back as we can find." ASCAP pays on surveys of performances, and it will look back through one survey year's worth of them. Performances older than that are not credited.

You have to ask. ASCAP does not automatically go looking. The same page tells you how: submit a Message through Member Access and select the category "Performance Claims", and ASCAP will research whether any retroactive royalties may be owed.

Radio has its own catch. ASCAP tracks terrestrial radio with a detection service and relies on your audio being in Mediabase. Its help centre says it generally does not pay retroactively for performances of music that was uploaded to Mediabase after the date of the performance. So a song that got airplay before it was fingerprinted anywhere is mostly unrecoverable on the radio side, whatever the survey-year rule says.

ASCAP is the more forgiving of the two big PROs on paper, but a year is a year. Seven years of an unregistered song leaves six of them on the floor.

How far back does BMI pay?

BMI's rules live in its Royalty Policy Manual (last updated 18 August 2025 at the time of reading), and they are tighter than ASCAP's.

For a work you simply registered late, the manual says: "If no payment was made because of missing/late cue sheets or work registrations, royalties will be paid beginning with the first possible distribution after all documents are received and processed, provided that they are received within nine months after the distribution in which royalties otherwise would have been paid had the necessary documents been submitted to BMI in a timely fashion."

Read that carefully, because it is not a nine-month look-back on performances. It is a nine-month window measured from the distribution that would have paid you. BMI pays quarterly and its distributions lag performances by roughly two quarters, so in practice the reach is short and it closes fast.

Two more rules from the same manual:

• Adjustment claims of any kind must be made in writing within nine months of the distribution being questioned. "Adjustments to royalties which were or should have been paid more than nine months before notice of the claim is received by BMI will not be considered."
• Publisher shares reported late are the hardest line of all. If you register a song and only later tell BMI a publisher holds part of it, BMI credits the publisher "beginning with the quarter in which such notice is received" and states in bold: "No Retroactive Adjustments Will Be Made."

Separately, BMI holds earnings that are under its payment minimum for a rolling twelve quarters, but that is money already attributed to you and waiting to cross a threshold, not unclaimed money. Different problem, covered on the payment-timing page.

How far back does SoundExchange pay?

SoundExchange is the clearest of the four, because its FAQ asks the question in your words and answers it in six: "How far back do you collect royalties? We collect as far back as 3 years."

It then answers the follow-up nobody wants to hear: "Do unclaimed royalties expire? Yes, after 3 years royalties expire and SoundExchange is authorized by regulation to release unclaimed royalties."

So if you were the featured artist or the sound recording owner on tracks played on SiriusXM, Pandora's radio tiers, iHeart's webcasts or digital cable music channels, the last three years of that money is recoverable the moment you register, and registration is free. Everything older than three years has been released. There is no appeal process for that; it is regulation, not policy.

A detail from the same FAQ that catches producers: a Letter of Direction, which is how a producer or engineer gets a cut of an artist's SoundExchange money, is "not retroactive unless that is specifically indicated on the LOD." If you are owed a producer share on old records, the artist has to write the retroactive scope into the letter.

How far back does The MLC pay?

The MLC is different from the other three because its holding period is written into federal law rather than set by policy, and because it has chosen to hold money for longer than the law requires.

The legal minimum is three years. The MLC states it plainly: "The MMA requires The MLC to hold (and continue efforts to match and distribute) royalties for a minimum of three years before distributing them via the congressionally mandated market share distribution process to rightsholders." Its resources page adds that unmatched or unclaimed royalties from usage on or after 1 January 2021 are held for a minimum of three years, and that interest accrued during that time is passed to the rightsholder.

In practice it has been six. As of September 2026 The MLC has made no market-share distributions at all. It says the first will begin in early 2027, starting with what is left from January 2021 usage, and that by then it will have held that money "for at least six years — twice as long as the three-year holding period set forth in the MMA." It plans to distribute one month of remaining royalties in each monthly distribution after that, allocated pro rata by digital service and offering, with interest at the statutory rate.

Claiming after the fact still works, right up until a period is distributed. This is the sentence that should send you to the portal: "Unclaimed shares of songs can always be claimed by the proper Member. When a song share is claimed by a Member, The MLC will distribute to the Member all related royalties held for past periods, together with statutory interest, excluding only royalties for periods that were already subject to a market share distribution."

In other words, for a song streamed in the US from 2021 to today whose composition you never registered, the mechanical royalties are sitting at The MLC with interest, and you can still have them — until, month by month starting in early 2027, each period gets spread across everyone else. January 2021 goes first. The MLC says it was holding less than $7 million in remaining unmatched and unclaimed royalties from that single month as of its January 2026 distribution, and expects the following months to be comparable.

How much of the 2021 money is actually still unmatched? Less than the headlines suggest. The MLC reports its average match rate for all 2021 usage is now 94%, and that only a small fraction of the recordings still unmatched from 2021 have accrued more than $100 each. That is the real shape of unclaimed money: a very long tail of very small amounts, some of which have your name on them.

What about streams from before 2021?

Those live in a separate pool. When the blanket licence took effect in 2021, 21 digital services handed The MLC every mechanical royalty from 2007 through 2020 that they had not been able to match — approximately $397 million at the rates the Copyright Royalty Board finally set. The MLC reports it has matched over $317 million of that (nearly 80%) to registered works and distributed over $229 million (nearly 58%) to members who claimed their shares.

The remainder is still being matched. The MLC says it will only look at market-share distribution of the historical pool after the process for the 2021-onward money is up and running, and will announce that timing well in advance. So for now, the historical pool has no closing date — which is exactly why it is the first place to look if your catalogue predates 2021.

Which of your royalties never had a window?

Your sound recording royalties from streaming — the Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music money — went to your distributor from the first stream, because the distributor is the registration. Nothing on that side was ever waiting on you. If you have been paid by DistroKid, TuneCore or CD Baby for years, that money is not what these windows are about.

What these windows are about is the other three pots the same stream created, which is the argument the whole royalties section of this site makes. One stream, four collectors, one of which was collecting for you automatically and three of which were holding money with no name on it.

A worked timeline, with no dollar amounts

Say you released a song in September 2023, it got real streams and some digital radio play, and you register everywhere today, September 2026. Here is what each collector's rules say you can and cannot reach.

• Distributor: already paid. Nothing to do.
• The MLC: the composition's mechanicals from September 2023 onward have been held as unmatched or unclaimed. Register the work, claim your share, and the held periods are paid with statutory interest. None of those months has been market-share distributed yet, because that process starts with January 2021 in early 2027 and moves forward one month at a time.
• SoundExchange: the last three years of digital performance royalties are inside the window. Every month you wait now pushes September 2023 closer to the edge of it.
• ASCAP: up to one survey year of surveyed performances can be credited, on request. The first two years of performances cannot.
• BMI: the late registration is paid from the next distribution after processing, only if it lands within nine months of the distribution that would have paid you. Most of the three years is outside that.

Now run the same timeline for a song released in 2019, which is what mine looked like. The distributor paid all along. The MLC's historical pool still holds whatever 2019 to 2020 mechanicals were never matched, and 2021 onward is held with interest. SoundExchange reaches back only to 2023. ASCAP reaches back one survey year. BMI, effectively, does not reach back at all. The order to work in writes itself.

What to do this week

1. Register with The MLC and claim your catalogue first. It is free, its pools are the largest and its clock is the most generous, and the first market-share distribution is months away, not years. Use the Works Registration tool for songs that are not in the database, the Claiming tool for songs someone else registered, and the Matching tool to look for your recordings among the unmatched.
2. Register with SoundExchange the same day. Also free. Three years back, and the oldest month in that window falls out every month you wait.
3. Register your works with your PRO, then file the claim. At ASCAP, register the works in Member Access and send a Performance Claims message asking for the one-survey-year retroactive review. At BMI, register the works immediately and understand that the nine-month rule means most old performances are gone.
4. If a publisher or co-writer share was left off, fix it now. BMI credits a late-reported publisher share only from the quarter it hears about it, with no retroactive adjustment. Every quarter of delay is a quarter of publisher share paid to nobody.
5. Then close the loop for the future. Add all four registrations to the release checklist so the next song never opens a window at all. The 90-minute registration checklist on this site is the order that works.

What I actually lost

I will never know the number, and that is the point. The performances of Puna Boy Anthem that happened in the years before I registered sit outside ASCAP's survey year and BMI's nine months, and the digital radio plays older than three years were released by SoundExchange under a regulation that does not have an appeal form. What I could recover, I recovered late, through a publishing administrator collecting the composition side — the Songtrust study on this site shows every dollar that came back.

The lesson is not "register early." Everyone says that. The lesson is that each collector's window is a real, published number, that the windows are different lengths, and that the shortest ones — the performance royalties on the composition — are on exactly the pot most new artists think they are covered for because they "know the name."

I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer or an accountant. Every window on this page was read from the collector's own published rules on 7 September 2026 — ASCAP's help centre, BMI's Royalty Policy Manual, SoundExchange's FAQ and The MLC's market-share and historical-royalties pages. These policies change; confirm the current rule with the organisation before relying on it. US collectors only; other territories run on different rules and different societies.