The Unclaimed Economy

The Music Modernization Act of 2018 established the Mechanical Licensing Collective to resolve the "black box" of unmatched mechanical royalties in the United States. Seven years on, our analysis of the MLC's public data—cross-referenced against 3.2 billion records from 12 independent sources—reveals that 4.25 million musical works still have partially or fully unclaimed royalties.

The central finding is structural, not operational. 67.5% of unclaimed works are registered for performance royalties at ASCAP—their writers registered with a PRO, but nobody registered the mechanical share at the MLC. 73% of the associated recordings are actively streaming on Spotify. This is not dormant catalogue. These are works generating revenue today, where a portion of the mechanical royalty has no registered claimant.

The MMA created a system to collect mechanical royalties. It did not solve the upstream problem: who registers them. The result is a structural gap between performance and mechanical registration that affects all publisher types equally, compounds when creators die, and is invisible to any single dataset in isolation.

The Scale of the Unclaimed Economy

Of 53.4 million works registered with the MLC, 4.25 million have royalties that no one is collecting. The system is overwhelmingly under-claimed, not over-claimed.

The distribution of unclaimed shares is not uniform. Nearly half of all unclaimed works (46.8%) fall in the 50–74% unclaimed band, with the single largest cluster at exactly 50%—comprising 1,546,295 works. This is not random; it is a structural signature explored in Finding 3.

At the extremes: 660,600 works are 100% orphaned—no publisher, no writer, no rights holder has registered any claim. Yet 52.2% of these orphans possess an ISWC, meaning they are identifiable compositions that simply have no claimant in the US mechanical system. Every one of these works that is actively streaming (Finding 4) is generating mechanical royalties that will be redistributed to registered publishers—predominantly the majors—if no claim is filed within the MMA's statutory window.

The Registration Gap: Performance vs Mechanical

2.85 million works with unclaimed mechanical royalties are registered for performance royalties at ASCAP. The writers showed up. The mechanical registration didn't follow.

This is the central finding of this analysis. By cross-referencing the MLC's unclaimed works against ASCAP's 13.1 million registered titles, we find that 67.5% of unclaimed MLC works have a title match in ASCAP's performance rights database.

These 2,854,874 works are not unregistered because the creators are unknown or disengaged. The writers registered with ASCAP for their performance royalties. But the corresponding mechanical share at the MLC was never registered—typically the publisher's responsibility, or in the case of self-published writers, a step that was simply never taken.

This finding has a direct implication for the MLC's statutory distribution mechanism. Under the MMA, unclaimed royalties are held for a period and then distributed on a market-share basis to existing registered publishers. The structural beneficiaries of this redistribution are necessarily the largest registered publishers—Universal Music Publishing, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell—because market-share distribution is proportional to existing registrations. This is not an accusation of wrongdoing; it is a mathematical consequence of the mechanism. The works generating these royalties have identifiable creators (they are registered at ASCAP), but because no mechanical claim exists, the royalties flow to the largest incumbents by default. The MMA created a system that assumes registration will happen and provides no mechanism to ensure it does.

The 50% Problem

The unclaimed economy is not concentrated in any one publisher segment. It is a structural gap in how the writer/publisher split is registered—and it affects everyone equally.

A natural hypothesis is that certain publisher types—DIY platforms, indie labels, or foreign CMOs—would show higher unclaimed rates than the majors. The data does not support this.

We categorised the top 50 publishers by volume into four segments: Major (Warner Chappell, Sony/ATV, Universal, BMG), Indie (Kobalt, Concord, Downtown), DIY (TuneCore, CD Baby, Songtrust, Sentric, BeatStars), and CMO/Administrator (SIAE, GEMA, MCPS, SUISA, NCB). The average unclaimed percentage ranges from 45.7% to 55.6%, with a median of 50.0% everywhere.

The structural evidence: of the 1.55 million works at exactly 50% unclaimed, the vast majority have one publisher registered at a 50% share. The other half—typically the writer's share or a co-publisher—is absent from the MLC. Combined with Finding 2 (the ASCAP cross-reference), this builds a clear causal chain: the writer registers with their PRO for performance royalties, the publisher registers their 50% mechanical share at the MLC, but nobody registers the writer's 50% mechanical share.

These Works Are Not Dormant

97% of unclaimed works have a recording. 73.4% of those recordings are on Spotify. This is active catalogue generating revenue with no mechanical claimant.

A reasonable assumption might be that unclaimed works are obscure, inactive, or historical. The data contradicts this.

97.2% of unclaimed works have at least one associated ISRC—meaning a recording exists and has been distributed. Using the full MLC ISRC-Work mapping (7.15M ISRCs from 3.35M unclaimed works), we matched these against 256 million Spotify tracks and found 5,249,731 ISRCs (73.4%) present on the platform. A 100,000-ISRC stratified sample returned a higher match rate of 83%, likely because sampling over-represents works with more ISRC variants; the full-join figure is the more conservative and reliable measure.

These works are actively generating streams. Under the MMA's statutory framework, the MLC collects mechanical royalties on these streams. For the unclaimed portion of each work, those royalties accumulate in escrow before eventual market-share distribution to registered publishers—predominantly the majors. The creators who registered with ASCAP (Finding 2) are receiving their performance royalties via their PRO. The mechanical share sits uncollected.

The ISWC Desert

42.5% of works in the US mechanical licensing system lack the global identifier that enables cross-border royalty collection.

The International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC) is the only globally accepted identifier for musical compositions. It connects a work registered at the MLC to the same work at PRS (UK), GEMA (Germany), or SACEM (France). Without it, cross-border matching relies on title and writer name fuzzy matching—a process that fails routinely.

The gap is correlated with unclaimed status. Among unclaimed works, only 45.6% have an ISWC, compared to 58.5% for claimed works—a 12.9 percentage-point gap. The causal direction is ambiguous: works without ISWCs may be harder to match, or works that nobody claims may never get assigned one. Either way, missing identifiers and missing claims compound each other.

For context, the open-source MusicBrainz database contains only 343,303 unique ISWCs—approximately 1.1% of the MLC's ISWC space. The gap between proprietary and open identifier coverage is vast, and represents a significant barrier to independent verification of rights data.

The Succession Gap

When creators die, their mechanical royalties often die with them. 84% of deceased music creators lack the identifier needed to collect.

Cross-referencing the MLC with Wikidata's structured data on 506,564 deceased individuals with music industry roles reveals a measurable failure in rights succession.

Only 81,069 (16%) of deceased music creators have an IPI number. The remaining 425,495 are invisible to the royalty system, even though 54% have MusicBrainz IDs and 47% have Discogs IDs. They exist in the metadata ecosystem; they aren't connected to the payment infrastructure.

Where we can match—using those 81,069 IPIs—we find 19,431 works with unclaimed royalties linked to a deceased writer. These works average 62% unclaimed, meaningfully higher than the 57.3% overall average. Death accelerates the unclaimed rate, consistent with the hypothesis that estates fail to maintain registrations.

The visible dip in the 1960s is not demographic—it reflects the founding of the IPI system. CISAC established the IPI (Interested Parties Information) identifier in 1965; creators who died before widespread IPI adoption are less likely to appear in this dataset.

The problem is worsening. The 2010s saw 18,940 IPI-holding creators die—the highest decade on record—and the 2020s are on track to match that pace (14,197 through early 2026). Each death creates a window where mechanical registrations may lapse if estates are unaware of their obligations.

The Registration Problem Is Solvable

The data points to a specific, bounded failure—not a diffuse, intractable one. That distinction matters.

Six findings, one structural thesis: the Music Modernization Act built a collection system and assumed registration would follow. It didn't. Seven years later, 4.25 million works sit in a gap between performance and mechanical rights systems—registered at one, absent from the other—while generating active streaming revenue that accrues to the largest incumbents by default.

But the shape of the problem also reveals why it is solvable. These are not unknown works by unknown creators. 67.5% are registered at ASCAP. The writers are identified. 73% are on Spotify. The recordings are active. 97% have ISRCs. The distribution chain is intact. The only thing missing is a mechanical registration—a form filing, not a discovery problem.

Three interventions follow directly from the data:

None of these interventions require new legislation, new infrastructure, or new technology. They require someone to do the work—to cross-reference the datasets that already exist, to file the registrations that were never made, to connect the identifiers that were never linked. The problem is administrative, not conceptual. The data to solve it is sitting in public and licensed databases. The question is whether the incentive structure of the current system—which redistributes unclaimed royalties to incumbents on a market-share basis—will ever produce the motivation to close the gap it profits from.

What This Means for Your Catalogue

Every finding in this research has a direct analogue at the individual catalogue level. If 67.5% of unclaimed works are registered at a PRO, the first question any publisher should ask is: are my works among them?

Revenue that is leaking, not lost. The distinction matters. “Lost” implies the money has disappeared. It hasn't. Mechanical royalties on unclaimed works are being collected by the MLC—they are sitting in escrow, accruing on a statutory countdown. When the holding period expires, those royalties are redistributed on a market-share basis to the largest registered publishers. The money isn't missing from the system. It is being collected, held, and given to someone else.

Yield erosion you can measure. Catalogue owners increasingly think in yield terms—annual revenue as a proportion of catalogue value. Every unregistered mechanical share is a direct drag on that yield. Unlike streaming market dynamics, which no individual publisher controls, registration gaps are entirely within the owner's power to close. An unclaimed mechanical share on an actively streaming work is not a market risk. It is an administrative failure with a calculable cost—and it is the single highest-ROI fix available to any catalogue owner, because the revenue already exists. It simply needs to be claimed.

Asset value compression. Music catalogue transactions now routinely price at 15–20x net publisher share. Buyers—Hipgnosis, Round Hill, Primary Wave, Concord, and the institutional capital behind them—conduct extensive due diligence before acquisition. A catalogue with significant unregistered mechanical shares is, by definition, under-earning relative to its potential. The gap between what a catalogue demonstrably earns and what it should earn is exactly where valuation discounts are applied. Incomplete registrations signal an unmanaged asset, and unmanaged assets compress the multiple. For any publisher considering a future sale, liquidity event, or catalogue valuation, unclaimed mechanicals are not just lost income—they are lost enterprise value at a double-digit multiple.

A fiduciary obligation, not just a commercial one. Publishers exist, contractually, to administer rights on behalf of their writers. If you hold publishing on a work and have not registered its mechanical share at the MLC, you are not only forgoing your own revenue—you are failing to collect on behalf of the writers whose royalties you are contracted to administer. For self-published writers, the gap is simpler but no less consequential: you registered with your PRO, your performance royalties flow correctly, but your mechanical share has been accumulating in escrow since January 2021—destined for redistribution to the majors unless you file the claim.

The cost of inaction compounds. This is not a one-time loss. Every month that a work remains unregistered is another month of mechanical royalties entering the redistribution pipeline. Every statutory distribution cycle that passes converts recoverable royalties into permanently redistributed ones. The problem is not static; it is accumulative. The longer the gap persists, the more value transfers irreversibly from the rightful owner to the default beneficiary.

The audit is straightforward in principle: match your catalogue against the MLC's public unclaimed index, cross-reference your PRO registrations, and identify works where you hold publishing but never filed the mechanical claim. Check your ISWC coverage (Finding 5)—works without ISWCs are invisible to every collection society outside the US. If you've inherited or acquired catalogue from a deceased creator (Finding 6), verify that mechanical registrations survived the transfer. These are not abstract problems. They are line items on a balance sheet that should be showing revenue and aren't.

Consider a songwriter who registered with ASCAP in 2015 and released through a distributor. Their performance royalties flow correctly through their PRO. But if neither they nor their publisher registered the mechanical share at the MLC, every stream since January 2021 has generated a mechanical royalty that sits in escrow. After the statutory holding period, that royalty is redistributed proportionally to Universal, Sony, and Warner Chappell—not because they claimed the work, but because the MMA's default mechanism allocates unclaimed funds by market share. The songwriter's ASCAP registration proves they exist. The MLC's unclaimed index proves the money is waiting. The only missing piece is a registration.

This pattern repeats across millions of works. The audit to identify them is deterministic—the same cross-referencing methodology behind this research.

TrackForge built the cross-referencing infrastructure described in this research—3.2 billion records across 12 sources, deterministic matching, no probabilistic guesswork—because we believe the registration gap is the defining inefficiency in music rights. We use it commercially to recover unclaimed royalties for our clients. We publish this research because the scale of the problem exceeds any single company's client base, and because structural problems require structural transparency to solve.

Data Sources & Methodology

All findings derive from deterministic SQL queries against structured datasets. No machine learning models, no probabilistic matching, no revenue estimation.

Data Sources

Analysis Pipeline

Limitations

This analysis is limited to the US mechanical licensing system. A work "unclaimed" at the MLC may be fully claimed at PRS, GEMA, SACEM, or other territorial societies. We do not estimate revenue impact, as per-work streaming counts are unavailable. The ASCAP cross-reference uses title matching, which introduces false positives from title collisions; BMI and SESAC data are not included, which likely undercounts the performance/mechanical gap. The deceased analysis is bounded by Wikidata's coverage of notable artists. Publisher classifications use entity name matching and may contain minor errors from variant names. The over-claiming analysis counts mechanical publisher shares only; including writer shares may yield different totals depending on how the MLC allocates share types.

Temporal limitation: All findings represent a single point-in-time snapshot. The MLC does not publish historical snapshots of its data, so we cannot show whether the unclaimed rate is improving, stable, or worsening since the MLC's launch in January 2021. A longitudinal study would require periodic data captures over multiple years—a significant gap in the available evidence base.

Unclaimed Royalties — FAQ

How much money is unclaimed at The MLC?

Approximately $569.9 million in US mechanical royalties sat in MLC holding accounts across usage years 2021–2024 — roughly $142.5 million per year collected but not distributed. Funds are held until the underlying musical works are matched to a registered rights-holder or are subject to market-share distribution after the statutory holding period.

Why are so many works unclaimed at the MLC?

The Music Modernization Act created a mechanism for collecting mechanical royalties but not for registering works. Publishers are responsible for filing work registrations themselves via CWR, and millions have not done so. 72.5% of the 954 million sound recordings in The MLC’s BWARM database have no matched mechanical work.

What is the difference between ASCAP/BMI registration and MLC registration?

ASCAP and BMI collect performance royalties for public performances (radio, streaming plays, venues). The MLC collects mechanical royalties for reproduction (streaming downloads and interactive streams in the US). A work can be registered at ASCAP for performance rights and still have no MLC registration for mechanical rights — 67.5% of MLC-unclaimed works are already registered at ASCAP.

How can I check if my works are unclaimed at The MLC?

Use the free TrackForge ISRC Lookup tool — paste an ISRC and the tool will query The MLC public API to return any matched work, writer shares, and publisher shares. If no MLC match is returned, the recording has no registered mechanical work and may be generating unclaimed royalties.

What is the ISWC Desert?

The ISWC Desert refers to the gap between recordings that have ISRCs (identifying the master) and works that have ISWCs (identifying the composition). Without an ISWC linkage, a recording cannot be mapped to its underlying work, and mechanical royalties cannot be correctly routed. This is one of the primary structural causes of unclaimed royalties at The MLC.

Disclosure

TrackForge is a catalogue management and rights intelligence platform. We provide rights audit, enrichment, and recovery services to music publishers and rights holders. This research note uses public and licensed data sources to analyse structural patterns in the US mechanical licensing system. The analysis was not commissioned by any third party. TrackForge's commercial services include identifying unclaimed royalties for clients—readers should consider this when evaluating our findings.

For methodology questions or data access requests, contact research@trackforge.studio