DEADLINES

The 2027 clock: when unmatched money stops being yours

The MLC holds unmatched royalties for at least three years. Then it distributes them to everyone else. The first month to go is January 2021, and it goes in early 2027.

The rule, in the MLC’s words

Royalties the MLC can’t match to a work, or that are matched but unclaimed, are held. The MLC’s own page says they are held “for a minimum of 3 years,” with interest, and that when it “does eventually exhaust its efforts” it distributes what remains “using a market share/activity-based formula.” That means the money goes to the publishers with the largest share of the market, in proportion to their share. It does not go to whoever it was owed to.

The MLC has said the market-share distributions begin in early 2027, one month of usage at a time, starting with January 2021. Once a month is distributed that way, your share of that month is gone.

How much is sitting there

The MLC’s page showed just over $6 million of January 2021 money still unmatched as of September 2026. That is one month. The founder of TuneCore, writing to the MLC in May 2026 with the Copyright Office copied, put the unpaid mechanicals at $17 to $25 million a month and asked a question the MLC had not answered in writing: whether money that rights holders have already claimed, with ISRCs, IPIs and song codes supplied, but that the MLC has not finished processing, is excluded from the market-share payout, or goes out with the rest.

What the clock means for a catalog

Every unmatched recording of yours has usage in it going back to the month it was first streamed. The oldest months are the first to be distributed, and the oldest months are the ones nobody has looked at. A recording that was unmatched in 2021 and is still unmatched today has five years of usage in the pool, and the first year of it is about to be paid to someone else.

It also means the order of work matters. A song with no registration can’t be matched at all until the registration exists and has been through the MLC’s processing. Register first, then match, and start with the recordings that have been earning longest.