Doubly Blackbox Checker - Find your unclaimed MLC royalties
Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours
Doubly Blackbox Checker is a free tool that helps songwriters discover unclaimed mechanical royalties at The MLC. By pasting a Spotify link or searching by name, you can see which of your recordings are missing, unmatched, or have unclaimed shares, and estimate the money stuck in the 'black box.' It leverages The MLC's public data to provide a clear status for each recording, from 'Looks good' to 'Missing work,' and explains how to fix issues. With a user-friendly interface and detailed explanations, it empowers artists to protect their earnings before the 2027 market-share distribution.
This tool shows you how much of your catalog is stuck in the black box, so you can claim what's yours before it's redistributed.
- kyasui
Thanks for building this!
I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.
- subract
A note: nowhere in your post or the site (except the footer) is the “MLC” acronym expanded. I certainly didn’t know what it was before now.
- addajones
Spotify is rate limited so its very difficult to check now. Happy you built it, hopefully we will be able to use it soon to check our catalog.
- quickdeer
I tried running an artist through who is a friend, with a few grand found. Will forward the link to her. Is this Spotify only? Thank you.
- needSomeCoffee
This is really interesting. Thanks for doing this. Checked one of my favorite artists who I would think is a very minor player in all this, and who is pretty original (Keb' Mo'). If I am reading the results right, he has $7,059 – $16,345 at risk. Wow. I hope this is widely used by the artists to understand the situation. Again, great work imho (I know virtually nothing about the music industry).