Guest
Serona Elton
Serona Elton is Head of Educational Partnerships at Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Serona Elton of the Mechanical Licensing Collective explains why songwriters miss royalties, how the MLC works, and what to do to collect what you are owed.
Questions these episodes answer
What is the Mechanical Licensing Collective and why was it created?
The MLC is a collective management organization created by the Music Modernization Act to collect and pay out digital mechanical royalties in the United States. It exists because digital services were sitting on large amounts of unpaid royalties they could not match to the correct songwriter, while facing repeated lawsuits over non-compliance with mechanical licensing law.
Why were smaller publishers and self-published songwriters missing out on royalties before the MLC existed?
Elton says big publishers knew how to connect with the companies handling mechanical licensing for platforms like Spotify, so they kept getting paid, while smaller publishers and songwriters administering their own rights simply did not know how to tap into that system, so a lot of people were left uncollected.
How many royalty streams does one Spotify stream actually generate?
Elton says a single stream on Spotify generates three separate sets of money: a performance royalty, a mechanical royalty, and a sound recording royalty that goes to the artist's distributor. She says most songwriters focus only on the first two and do not realize they need to collect all three.
What should a songwriter do first to make sure they are collecting all the royalties they are owed?
Elton recommends joining songwriter organizations such as NSAI or SONA for education and advocacy, reading foundational music business books, and using the MLC's own free webinars and YouTube materials, which start from the basics of what rights and royalties exist before getting into mechanicals specifically.