This morning Songpreneurs attended an informative session with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) hosted by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce at Belmont University.
The name of the program was MLC Mission of Music: From Metadata To Money.
First, the panelists were introduced –
Leigh McCorkle – Chief People Officer
Kris Ahrend – Chief Executive Officer
Andrew Mitchell – Head of Analytics and Automation
Taylor Johns – Specialist, Payments
Here are the highlights:
The program introduced the MLC as a start up company that was tasked by the United States Copyright Office with putting together a system of handling the job designated and required by the Music Modernization Act to collect and correctly distribute the mechanical royalties for all the digital music streaming services to U.S. songwriters and publishers.
The team met only a few times prior to the start of the Pandemic lockdowns, and were required to work remotely for the first year or more of operations.
Hiring was rapid and involved a heavy student outreach initiative to colleges such as Belmont University, and used Spark Hire to find 10 students for the purpose of training them for future employment opportunities at MLC.
Their primary focus in the early stages was to build a robust customer service team to handle incoming calls, chats and emails from songwriters and publishers interested in signing up. The first incoming call was a songwriter who needed tech coaching to navigate the process, lasting 2 hours.
These call centers are open M-F for 12 hours per day to serve customers, and currently handle an average of 2000 interactions per month.
The guiding principles under which MLC operates are:
· Excellence
· Transparency
· Diversity
· Service
These customer service representatives were among the first teams hired by the MLC upon formation.
The last team the MLC hired at inception was the team that does the heavy-duty work of collecting and matching the royalty, only one month prior to operation.
The head of that team said he had 24 hours to create a training module for something he had never done personally.
The MLC team now claims 90% accuracy and a 87% matching rate.
This refers to the ability of the MLC team to accurately match the incoming data and royalty money from the streaming service companies’ recording data to their MLC issued identification codes for the composition embodied in that recording.
With over 130 million sound recordings and 28 million songs registered, the MLC is looking forward to accurately matching and paying out royalties to all their members even more efficiently in coming years.
In fact, MLC says that improvement and engagement are their primary focus for the next 5 years.
Thanks to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce for providing quality information sessions like these for songwriters and music business entrepreneurs in Music City.
Songpreneurs looks forward to continuing to serve as a Music Industry Resource.
Are you a songwriter or music publisher eager to learn what this information means for you and your career?
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