Articles · Business
Your PRO Only Pays You Half Your Royalties. The Other Half Has a Name You've Never Registered With.
The Set Newsroom · Mon Sep 28 2026
Your PRO membership only covers half your publishing money. The other half has a name, it's free to claim, and the 2026 rate increase just made skipping it more expensive.
You signed up with ASCAP or BMI, checked the box, and figured your publishing money was handled. It isn't. PROs only collect one of two royalty types songwriters are owed, and the one they skip just got a raise from the federal government. If you haven't registered with The MLC, you're leaving money on the table every single month, and most artists don't find out until years of it has piled up.
Two Buckets, Not One
Publishing royalties for a song split into two completely separate buckets. Performance royalties get paid when your song is played publicly: radio, streaming platforms, live venues, TV. That's what ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC collect. Mechanical royalties get paid when your song is reproduced: a CD pressed, a download sold, or a stream played. PROs do not touch mechanical royalties. Never have.
If you're only registered with a PRO, industry publishing administrators estimate you're collecting roughly half of what you're actually owed. Music publishing royalties explained - Groover The other half sits with a separate organization built specifically for streaming: The Mechanical Licensing Collective, or The MLC.
The Rate Just Went Up, And Almost Nobody Noticed
The Copyright Royalty Board sets U.S. mechanical rates under a multi-year ruling called Phonorecords IV, covering 2023 through 2027. The statutory rate for physical copies and permanent downloads has climbed every January: 12.0 cents in 2023, 12.4 cents in 2024, 12.7 cents in 2025, and 13.1 cents as of January 1, 2026. Mechanical Royalties Explained for Musicians - Chartlex
Streaming works differently. Instead of a flat per-song rate, songwriters get a percentage of a platform's revenue pool, and that percentage is scheduled to keep rising toward a 15.35% cap by 2027. Every point of that increase is real money, and none of it reaches you automatically. You have to be registered to collect it.
Where The Money Actually Goes If You Skip This
The MLC has distributed over $4 billion in streaming mechanical royalties since it started operating. The Mechanical Licensing Collective Money that isn't matched to a registered songwriter doesn't vanish. It sits in an unmatched pool while The MLC tries to figure out who wrote the song, based on metadata your distributor may or may not have filled in correctly.
That's the second trap. Even artists who know about mechanical royalties lose money to bad metadata: a misspelled songwriter name, a missing ISRC, a split that was never finalized between collaborators. If The MLC can't match your stream data to your registration, your money joins the unmatched pool instead of your account.
Why This Slips Past So Many Independent Artists
Most independent artists come up through a distributor like DistroKid or CD Baby, register with a PRO because someone told them to, and assume the two systems talk to each other. They don't. The MLC only launched in 2021, it's still not common knowledge outside publishing circles, and there's no popup that tells you when you're missing it. You have to go find it yourself.
The MLC's own numbers back this up. The organization only ran its first "Music Registration 101" course in May 2026, five years after launching, specifically because so many songwriters still don't understand what they're missing. Home - The MLC
Do The Math On What You're Actually Missing
Streaming mechanical rates run roughly $0.001 to $0.002 per stream on major platforms, paid on top of whatever your distributor already sends you for the recording itself. That sounds tiny until you scale it. A song that hits one million streams can generate an extra $1,000 to $2,000 in mechanical royalties alone, money that goes unclaimed if you never registered as the songwriter. Multiply that across a catalog of 20 or 30 songs and skipping The MLC isn't a rounding error. It's rent.
International royalties make the gap worse. Money collected overseas for your song typically becomes inaccessible after two to three years if nobody claims it, and it often ends up in a "black box" that gets redistributed to other rights holders instead of you. Publishing administrator Songtrust says it has helped more than 445,000 songwriters collect global royalties they would have otherwise missed. What Indie Artists Need to Understand - Hypebot That's not a niche problem. That's the default outcome if you do nothing.
How To Actually Fix This This Week
- Register with The MLC directly at themlc.com. It's free, and it takes less time than uploading a single to your distributor.
- Register every song you've released, not just new ones. The catalog-wide registration is what unlocks retroactive matching.
- Double-check your metadata: correct songwriter names, ISRCs, and publisher splits on every release going forward.
- If you write with anyone else, get the split agreement in writing before the song goes out, not after it starts making money.
- Keep your PRO registration too. You need both. Neither one replaces the other.
The Takeaway
A PRO membership feels like it covers you because nobody explains that it only covers half the job. The other half has a name, it's free to join, and the check that's been sitting there since your first release doesn't come looking for you. You have to go get it. If you want a walkthrough of what else independent artists leave unclaimed, The Set's free School breaks down getting paid step by step, and The Set's pricing page shows how the platform is built so you keep what you earn from day one.
Questions
What is the difference between a PRO and The MLC?
A PRO (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) collects performance royalties, paid when your song is played publicly, including on the radio and on streaming platforms. The MLC collects mechanical royalties, paid when your song is reproduced through a stream, download, or physical copy. They are separate royalty types collected by separate organizations, and registering with one does not register you with the other.
How much is the US mechanical royalty rate in 2026?
As of January 1, 2026, the U.S. statutory mechanical rate for physical copies and permanent downloads is 13.1 cents per song, set by the Copyright Royalty Board under the Phonorecords IV ruling. The streaming mechanical royalty share for songwriters is separately scheduled to rise toward a 15.35% cap by 2027.
Is registering with The MLC free?
Yes. Registration with The Mechanical Licensing Collective is free for songwriters, composers, self-published artists, and publishers. The MLC has distributed over $4 billion in streaming mechanical royalties since launching.