I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.
Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
How can music be on steaming platforms if the owner who should collect this doesn't consent to it? If it's their label posting it, shouldn't the label be handling renumeration?
Or is this for music distributed by DistroKid, CDBaby etc. before 2018?
Music is broken down into two copyrights: Masters and Publishing.
Masters is the recording themselves, made by recording artists, distributed by record labels and distributors (DistoKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, etc.)
Publishing is the "work" or the song... made by songwriters, and royalties are processed by Music Publishers and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).
A good way to wrap your head around it is... I can record a cover of Katy Perry's Firework... I can distribute that master (and make money) to DSPs like Spotify etc... but I do not own the "song" Firework.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) is the body that governs US digital streaming mechanical royalties, which is a right on the publishing side.
Just a note ... "mechanical" royalties are publishing royalties payable when a duplicate is created. Back when the duplicate was sheet music or a record pressing that made sense linguistically. Nowadays, mechanicals are due when a stream is done or a digital copy is made.
Public performances like a live concert get a different category of license.
You don't need permission for radio-style playback of songs (in the US). There's a mechanical license available and royalties go to a rights collective.
Playing specific songs on demand requires permission, IIRC.
This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).
When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.
The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
while i do not think you should be downvoted for your comment - I think it is pretty representative of creatives in the music industry, who just seem to be more pissed off in general than others - the thing that is too good to be true is your monetary estimate of value. Of course, if your tool reported the honest answers (nearly "zero" for everybody), people would not pay attention, and this lead gen tool you have developed would not be very interesting.
In your own words:
> We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate.
As someone who models stuff for part of my living, I understand the spirit of what you are achieving here, but there are too many assumptions / genuine unknowns. Like just in terms of the things you said: you would need the real premium and and supported stream counts over time, the relative market share and stream counts in other services over time, broken down by country, and of course, what "mechanical rate" really means, because there's what Spotify pays versus everything else, and what Spotify, for example, pays, is really fluid.
For other readers: Artists certainly think in terms of pay per stream, but that's not really how Spotify pays, for many payees (the MLC and the other categories). So even though this guy making this website is a professional in the music industry and knows all this, he is so focused on lead gen that he keeps things simple - fine, that's valid - but nonetheless wildly inaccurate.
I apologize for jumping to that so quickly. I respect your response, and you're correct. There is a lot of nuance to this. It's a best estimate because we don't have all of the information, how much is on Spotify vs other platforms, US plays vs non-US plays.
All that being said, the low-end of the estimate is VERY real, because we sum up an actual number provided by The MLC. For their unmatched data, they provide a range of one dollar sign ($) $0.01 - $0.99, ($$) $1.00 - $10.00, ($$$) $10.01 - $50.00, ($$$$) $50.01 - $250, and ($$$$$) $250.01 and above. Those exact figures get worked into the estimate, and are real hard baselines that we use for the estimate. There is no inflation from us on those figures. When a track has an unbounded (five dollar sign), we then use Spotify counts to estimate where in the range it falls.
Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.
I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.
Thanks for building this!
I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.
Spotify is rate limited so its very difficult to check now. Happy you built it, hopefully we will be able to use it soon to check our catalog.
Thanks for letting me know, I'm checking the logs now.
appreciate it! I don't want to bombard the system you set up, but very eager to check as I'm sure there could be income not collected and missing.
Appreciate it, we blew through 250K tracks in an hour, the HN hug is real. We have added more capacity.
A note: nowhere in your post or the site (except the footer) is the “MLC” acronym expanded. I certainly didn’t know what it was before now.
Excellent point, I'll fix that.
I tried running an artist through who is a friend, with a few grand found. Will forward the link to her. Is this Spotify only? Thank you.
Amazing! The only stream count we can find that is publicly available is Spotify, so we use it as a reference point in our calculation, and it's why we give a range. If they have heavy plays on a different streaming platform like Apple, we don't have a good way of finding that number.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
Searched for a band/album for which I was a credited performer. The band has eight figures in views - enough to justify pursuing.
Got a 500 shown as an error message on your site, related to a failed connection to Spotify.
Spotify is throttling us very hard right now. Check back tomorrow, you should most definitely look that artist up.
How can music be on steaming platforms if the owner who should collect this doesn't consent to it? If it's their label posting it, shouldn't the label be handling renumeration?
Or is this for music distributed by DistroKid, CDBaby etc. before 2018?
Music is broken down into two copyrights: Masters and Publishing.
Masters is the recording themselves, made by recording artists, distributed by record labels and distributors (DistoKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, etc.)
Publishing is the "work" or the song... made by songwriters, and royalties are processed by Music Publishers and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).
A good way to wrap your head around it is... I can record a cover of Katy Perry's Firework... I can distribute that master (and make money) to DSPs like Spotify etc... but I do not own the "song" Firework.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) is the body that governs US digital streaming mechanical royalties, which is a right on the publishing side.
Just a note ... "mechanical" royalties are publishing royalties payable when a duplicate is created. Back when the duplicate was sheet music or a record pressing that made sense linguistically. Nowadays, mechanicals are due when a stream is done or a digital copy is made.
Public performances like a live concert get a different category of license.
You don't need permission for radio-style playback of songs (in the US). There's a mechanical license available and royalties go to a rights collective.
Playing specific songs on demand requires permission, IIRC.
This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).
When the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018... all US digital streaming mechanical royalties we're just held until the MLC was operational in 2021. So this is money owed from 2018 through 2026, it adds up.
Wow thanks for this! Right now it’s rate limited, could we pass you the metadata directly maybe? To not burn your ip with their servers
We just added more capacity, and are adding even more here in a bit.
Not really any indication that you are collecting data for your own usage. No source code at least?
On that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?
The code behind this is a whole AWS stack built as part of our larger infrastructure. It's not just a simple script, it's a full data pipeline. The MLC data is ~400GB of raw TSV data dropped on an FTP server every week, which we then process, index, make available internally for our tools. The Blackbox site is a frontend that leverages this infrastructure.
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)
Seems too good to be true (because it is).
I bet you're a blast at parties. Everything about this is publicly verifiable.
it’s true (ran a music company)
while i do not think you should be downvoted for your comment - I think it is pretty representative of creatives in the music industry, who just seem to be more pissed off in general than others - the thing that is too good to be true is your monetary estimate of value. Of course, if your tool reported the honest answers (nearly "zero" for everybody), people would not pay attention, and this lead gen tool you have developed would not be very interesting.
In your own words:
> We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate.
As someone who models stuff for part of my living, I understand the spirit of what you are achieving here, but there are too many assumptions / genuine unknowns. Like just in terms of the things you said: you would need the real premium and and supported stream counts over time, the relative market share and stream counts in other services over time, broken down by country, and of course, what "mechanical rate" really means, because there's what Spotify pays versus everything else, and what Spotify, for example, pays, is really fluid.
For other readers: Artists certainly think in terms of pay per stream, but that's not really how Spotify pays, for many payees (the MLC and the other categories). So even though this guy making this website is a professional in the music industry and knows all this, he is so focused on lead gen that he keeps things simple - fine, that's valid - but nonetheless wildly inaccurate.
I apologize for jumping to that so quickly. I respect your response, and you're correct. There is a lot of nuance to this. It's a best estimate because we don't have all of the information, how much is on Spotify vs other platforms, US plays vs non-US plays.
All that being said, the low-end of the estimate is VERY real, because we sum up an actual number provided by The MLC. For their unmatched data, they provide a range of one dollar sign ($) $0.01 - $0.99, ($$) $1.00 - $10.00, ($$$) $10.01 - $50.00, ($$$$) $50.01 - $250, and ($$$$$) $250.01 and above. Those exact figures get worked into the estimate, and are real hard baselines that we use for the estimate. There is no inflation from us on those figures. When a track has an unbounded (five dollar sign), we then use Spotify counts to estimate where in the range it falls.
I appreciate the thoughtful conversation.
the range of dollar signs... it sounds like MLC doesn't know haha
Right? They have the real numbers, they just purposefully obfuscate it.
Cool, so not only do Spotify pay big record labels/artists more than smaller artists (because if I listen exclusively to artist X, my subscription money is paid across all streams globally on the platform, not just the artist I actually listened to) but then it double dips and those artists could be getting fucked over twice.
Wow, streaming is great.
I agree with you that pro-rata streaming royalties are not ideal. DSPs like Deezer do have 'artist centric' royalty systems, which I think are great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.