MATCHING

Registered isn’t paid: the MLC matches store by store

The MLC doesn’t match a recording to a work once. It matches each store’s copy of it, separately. A registration with recordings on it can still be leaving most of the money in the unmatched pool.

How the MLC sees a recording

Every store reports its own usage to the MLC under its own copy of the recording: the ISRC, the title and the artist as that store has them. The MLC matches each copy to a work on its own. One ISRC can end up matched on four stores and unmatched on eight, and the work looks “matched” in the portal because some of it is.

The band The Walters found this in their own catalog in 2023 and put it on the record with the Copyright Office. “Autumn Leaves” was matched only on Qobuz, Audiomack and Amazon, and could not be found in the Matching Tool even though it is on Spotify and Apple. Five other works were matched only on Amazon, Pandora or one other store. Six songs showed up as both matched and unmatched. The MLC’s reply was that resubmitting the recordings “does not guarantee automated matches,” and risked creating duplicates, so they should use the Matching Tool.

It isn’t a small-catalog problem

Three songwriters told the Copyright Office in 2024 that they had searched the Matching Tool for “Heaven” by Bryan Adams and found a copy sitting in the unmatched pool with the ISRC, the title, the artist and the writers all filled in: a global hit, earning for forty years, unmatched. A publisher of legacy standards testified to Congress in 2023 that for one well-known song, 11% of the recording-to-work matches were wrong, and for another, 20%.

Why you can’t see it from the portal

The portal shows a work and the recordings matched to it. It doesn’t show the copies of those recordings that aren’t matched, and it doesn’t show which store each matched copy came from. If you search for a recording the MLC has matched somewhere, it tells you the recording “has already been matched” and nothing else. Bulk and manual submissions get no response file. The founder of TuneCore put it to the MLC in writing in 2024: “We have zero insight into which ISRCs are associated with the work.”