Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours
Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists:When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box".That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers.This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January.Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027.That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywal
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
No competitor data yet
Trend
No signal yet
Free tool that helps musicians claim their share of $656M in unclaimed mechanical royalties before the MLC distributes it to major publishers by default in January 2027.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Solves a real, time-bound problem with a hard deadline (January 2027) that creates urgency
- Massive addressable market: hundreds of thousands of independent musicians globally
- Clear regulatory tailwind: MMA created the problem and the deadline
- Creator has domain expertise and existing business infrastructure
- Free tool removes friction and builds trust before monetization
- Quantified opportunity: $656M unclaimed, $76.61M annual distribution starting soon
- Low competition: no existing tools solve this specific problem at scale
Risks
- Regulatory risk: MLC could change market share rules or extend deadlines, reducing urgency
- Execution risk: MLC metadata matching is complex; false positives/negatives could damage credibility
- Monetization risk: creators may resist paying for help claiming their own money; margins depend on volume
- Market risk: most independent musicians are price-sensitive and may not convert to paid services
- Dependency risk: entire business depends on MLC data access and cooperation
- Scaling risk: two-person team at Doubly cannot handle hundreds of thousands of claims manually
- Churn risk: one-time transaction (claim money once) means customer lifetime value is low unless you build ongoing publishing admin
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
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