knaught

Interesting, would you mind sharing the album? There might be some weirdness with album searching with our latest updates.

We're back now, give it a whirl!

Apologies for the delay, we're back now!

Right? They have the real numbers, they just purposefully obfuscate it.

Spotify is throttling us very hard right now. Check back tomorrow, you should most definitely look that artist up.

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.

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.

We just added more capacity, and are adding even more here in a bit.

Appreciate it, we blew through 250K tracks in an hour, the HN hug is real. We have added more capacity.

Thanks for letting me know, I'm checking the logs now.

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.

I bet you're a blast at parties. Everything about this is publicly verifiable.

Excellent point, I'll fix that.

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.)

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.

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)

Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists:

When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box".

That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers.

This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January.

Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027.

That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywall, the reports are completely actionable without needing anything from us.

The tool: paste a Spotify artist link (or search for a Spotify artist by name). It pulls every release on that profile, checks each recording against The MLC's public bulk data, and tells you per-song whether it's fully claimed, partially claimed, registered but unmatched, or missing entirely. It then provides a link to the exact MLC tool that fixes each case. It also estimates the dollars stuck, as a rough range.

Even if you're not an artist yourself, you probably know someone who is a musician, please share it with them.

Thanks for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions about the industry as a whole, The MLC, the tech, anything really.

We currently have a prototype of Loom running in HTML5 via WebGL and emscripten. We also have a much earlier version of Loom running under Flash Player using FlasCC. We could also potentially target NaCL in Chrome.

Each option has its positives and negatives.

With Adobe dropping the 'Flash Tax', it makes targeting Flash a much more desirable option, however there is a ton of merit to having things run in HTML5 (either WebGL or Canvas).

The long story short is, browser support is on the roadmap, but which path to take is unclear. So we're open to input from the community on this.

Cheers, Nate

The Engine Company is a small company (5 of us) based in Eugene, OR. We are self funded so we don't have any VCs that we have to please.

We feel our licensing terms are very fair: http://theengine.co/license

Haha.. good catch. Already have submitted a pull request with the fix for it.

Cheers!