Answers/Getting paid/Why Your Royalties Are Sitting Unclaimed (And How to Go Get Them)

Getting paid

Why Your Royalties Are Sitting Unclaimed (And How to Go Get Them)

By Boboy Watson·Last verified August 31, 2026·1,993 words·Getting paid

The first time I searched my own name in The MLC's public database, I found a song of mine already registered — by a co-writer, correctly, with his share listed and mine missing entirely. He had not done anything wrong. He registered his half, assumed the form covered the song, and the other half of that composition had been quietly unmatched for two years while the track kept streaming.

That is what unclaimed royalties actually look like. Not a vault with your name on it. A record that is almost right.

Why do royalties go unclaimed in the first place?

Because the money is generated by law and by contract, and the payment is triggered by a registration you file.

A Spotify stream in the United States produces a mechanical royalty on the composition under the Section 115 blanket licence whether or not the writer has ever heard of The MLC. A Pandora radio spin produces a digital performance royalty on the recording under 17 U.S.C. 114 whether or not the artist has registered with SoundExchange. A song played in a bar produces a performance royalty on the composition whether or not the writer is affiliated with ASCAP or BMI.

None of those systems is designed to find you. They are designed to collect first and match second, because collecting is centralised and matching depends on data that only rights holders can supply. When the match fails, the money does not disappear and it does not bounce back to the payer. It sits.

So "unclaimed royalties" is not an exotic situation that happens to people who did something wrong. It is the default state of every release by every artist who has not completed all four registrations, and most independent artists have completed one.

Where does unclaimed money actually sit?

Four collectors, four different holding mechanisms, four different ways to search.

The fourth row is the one people forget. A distributor balance sitting below a withdrawal threshold is not unclaimed in the legal sense, but it is money you have not been paid, and it behaves the same way from your bank account's point of view.

What is the $424 million figure, exactly?

You will see this number quoted constantly, usually as though there is a $424 million pile sitting at The MLC right now waiting for somebody to walk in.

That is not what it is. Approximately $424 million was the accrued historical unmatched mechanical royalty money that digital services transferred to The MLC in 2021, when the Music Modernization Act blanket licence took effect. It covered years of prior streaming usage that the services had collected mechanicals on but never successfully matched to a copyright owner under the old notice-of-intention system. It was a one-time handover of a historical backlog, not a live balance and not a current figure.

Since then The MLC has matched and distributed a substantial portion of it and continues to accumulate new unmatched royalties month by month as usage arrives that does not link to any registered work. The current unmatched balance is a moving number, reported periodically by The MLC, and it is not $424 million.

The reason to get this right is that the correct version is more useful than the myth. The myth suggests a jackpot. The reality tells you something structural: unmatched royalties are produced continuously by a system that cannot identify unregistered works, and your share of that flow is generated every month you stay unregistered, in amounts proportional to your own usage. There was never going to be a windfall. There is a leak.

What are the specific reasons a royalty fails to match?

These are the failure modes, in roughly the order I see them.

No publisher entity registered. You affiliated with ASCAP or BMI as a writer, registered your works, and left the publisher field empty. The writer share pays. The publisher share — the other 50% of every performance royalty on that composition — has no claimant. BMI charges $175 to affiliate an individual publisher and ASCAP charges $50 for a publisher account, as of August 2026, and that fee is the whole barrier.

The composition was never registered with The MLC. This is the largest single category and it applies to almost every artist who has only ever used basic distribution. DistroKid Musician, TuneCore Rising Artist and CD Baby's per-release products are sound recording services. None of them registers a composition with The MLC.

Songs registered by only one of several co-writers. The work exists in the database with partial shares. The registered writer gets paid, the unregistered ones do not, and the work never shows as missing because from the database's point of view it is there.

Misspelled or inconsistent writer names. A legal name on one registration and a stage name on another. A middle initial that appears sometimes. A hyphenated surname entered two ways. Matching leans on writer name and IPI number, and an IPI entered wrong on a single registration will break the link between that work and everything else you own.

Mismatched ISRCs. The MLC connects reported streaming usage to your composition through the ISRCs listed on the work registration. If the ISRC on the work does not match the ISRC your distributor actually issued for that recording, the usage arrives and lands nowhere. This one is completely invisible from inside your account.

Catalogue released before affiliation. Music you put out in the years before you joined ASCAP or BMI, before The MLC existed, or before you registered with SoundExchange, generated royalties with no account to attribute them to.

Releases under an alias, side project or old band name. SoundExchange in particular matches on artist name. A project you stopped using in 2019 has its own unclaimed record, under a name you no longer search for.

A publishing administrator registered your works and you also registered them directly. Overlapping claims on one composition create a conflict, and the disputed share is frozen until the parties resolve it. This produces the same symptom as being unregistered, with a harder fix.

Shares that do not total 100%. A work registration where the writer shares add to 90% or 110% sits in a conflict state and does not pay.

How do I go and get it? A recovery procedure

Work through this in order. The order matters because each step produces identifiers the next one needs.

1. List every release you have ever put out. Every single, EP, album, remix, live version, side project, band, production alias and feature. Include things you would rather forget — those are exactly where forgotten money sits.
2. Pull the ISRC for every recording from DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby or whichever distributor released it. Put them in one spreadsheet with the title, the release date and the composition each recording belongs to.
3. Confirm your PRO affiliation and record your IPI number. If you have never affiliated, do it now — BMI is free for writers, ASCAP is $50 as of August 2026 — because the IPI is the identifier every later step wants.
4. Affiliate a publisher entity at the same organisation and note its own IPI. BMI individual publisher is $175, corporation or LLC $250, partnership $500. ASCAP publisher is $50. Without this, half of every performance royalty on every one of your works stays unclaimed.
5. Search your PRO's public repertory — ACE at ASCAP, Songview at BMI. For each of your songs, confirm the work exists, all co-writers are listed with the correct affiliations and IPI numbers, and shares total exactly 100%. File corrections for anything wrong.
6. Register with The MLC as both writer and publisher. It is free and takes about twenty minutes for the account.
7. Search The MLC's public database for every title in your spreadsheet and for your name as a writer. You are looking for three outcomes: the work is missing entirely, the work exists but you are not on it, or the work exists with wrong or missing ISRCs. Each has its own remedy in the portal.
8. Register every work with The MLC and attach every ISRC for every recording of that composition — original, radio edit, acoustic, live, remix. This attachment is what connects reported streaming usage to your song.
9. Register with SoundExchange as both featured artist and sound recording owner, and run their unclaimed royalties search on your artist name, every alias, every side project and every band you have been a member of.
10. Set payment methods deliberately. At The MLC, choose ACH direct deposit — the US minimum is $5, versus $100 for a physical check and $250 for a wire. Getting this wrong means the money you just recovered sits in a balance instead of your bank.
11. Add the whole sequence to your release checklist so the next song is registered in the week it comes out rather than recovered in three years.

Steps 7 and 8 are where the actual recovery happens. Everything before them is building the identity that makes the claim possible, and everything after is making sure you never have to do this again.

What if somebody else has already claimed my song?

This happens, and it is not usually theft. The common causes are a co-writer registering the whole work instead of their share, a publisher registration left over from a deal that ended, or an administrator that registered your catalogue and never removed it after you left.

The MLC has a conflict process for exactly this. You file your claim against the existing work record, the conflicting claimant is notified, and the disputed share does not pay to anyone until it is resolved. The undisputed shares continue to pay normally.

Two practical notes. First, resolve it directly with the other party where you can — a co-writer amending their own registration is far faster than a formal dispute. Second, a split sheet signed at the time of writing is what makes this conversation short. Without one, you are arguing from memory about a session years ago, and the database sides with whoever registered first until somebody proves otherwise.

What does unclaimed money actually cost you?

The honest answer is that for a small catalogue it is usually not a life-changing sum, and the reason to fix it anyway is not the back payment.

It is that the four registrations are one-time and the leak is permanent. Every month you stay unregistered, the mechanical on every US stream goes unmatched, the publisher half of every performance royalty goes unclaimed, and any non-interactive radio play accrues against a recording with no payee. Fixing it once stops all of that going forward, and it costs $0 at The MLC, $0 at SoundExchange, $0 for a BMI writer affiliation, and $175 for a BMI publisher affiliation as of August 2026.

The back payment is the small part. The registration is the part that matters, and the only version of this that is genuinely expensive is the one where you do it in year eight instead of year one.

This is one artist's account of recovering his own registrations, not legal or financial advice. Claiming processes and holding rules change — work from The MLC's, SoundExchange's and your PRO's current documentation rather than from any summary, including this one.