The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC)

The MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) is an organization responsible for granting licenses to all streaming services in the United States. They also collect and distribute all royalties that result from the streaming of music. The primary objective of MLC is to match as many unmatched royalties and compositions with the appropriate rightsholders as possible. In doing so, MLC maintains a publicly-accessible database of songwriters, works, rightsholders, and related recordings. The establishment of MLC was a part of the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018.