In the USA, copyright law was modernised in 2018. The most important point of the so-called “Music Modernization Act” was the reform of the rules for online use. Specifically, it was decided, among other things, to introduce a central administration office through which digital music providers could pay for mechanical licenses.
This task was assigned to the newly created non-profit organisation “Mechanical Licensing Collective” (in short: MLC). Since January 2021, MLC has been collecting licence fees for mechanical rights from the streaming and download service providers for the USA and distributing it to the rightsholders on a monthly basis.
SUISA is a member of MLC
In addition to its mandate assigned to it by the government, the “Mechanical Licensing Collective” does not see itself as a conventional collective management organisation and is not a member of the international umbrella organisation CISAC. There is also no reciprocal agreement in place as is the case with other sister organisations. Instead, SUISA is registered as a member of MLC.
SUISA’s repertoire has been licensed by MLC since April 2021. As a basis for licensing, SUISA submits a weekly data transfer of the 5,000 SUISA works with the most online use over the last six months. These works are then ingested into the MLC database. To date, around 280,000 SUISA works have been registered in this way. The number of SUISA works registered with the MLC is constantly increasing due to the regular data delivery updates of the most frequently used top titles.
Settlement of the revenues
The works database is publicly accessible on the website of the “Mechanical Licensing Collective” (www.themlc.com). If works are missing in the MLC database or if data needs to be changed or corrected, members or principals can inform SUISA by selecting “General inquiry” within the member portal “My account”. The information is forwarded to MLC in one of the subsequent weekly data mailings.
Once the correct processing of the distribution data supplied by MLC had been ensured, remuneration has been regularly distributed since spring 2023. A total of around CHF 500,000 was paid out for the usage periods from April 2021 to February 2024. MLC royalties are regularly distributed via our international distributions.
