One song, drawn as weather and land. Its royalties rain from the cloud onto eight peaks, one for each royalty type, then run downhill as colour-coded rivers through every society, administrator, and payer that touches the money, into the lake at the bottom: the artist’s account.
New in this version: every numbered stop is clickable Tap or click any numbered circle on a river, on the map or in the list beside it, and a pop-up box opens explaining who that stop is and what it does. There are 26 stops across the eight tributaries.
Registration is what keeps the tributaries flowing. The MLC can only pay songwriters and publishers whose works it can match, and every society on this map works the same way. A work that is not properly registered before release is a tributary that never reaches the river.
On the map they appear as survey control points, the fixed markers the whole terrain is measured against. They do not collect the money; they decide what it is worth and who is allowed to collect it.
A panel of federal judges that sets the statutory rates for mechanical licences and webcasting. For the 2023 to 2027 rate period, the headline streaming mechanical rate runs from 15.1% to 15.35% of a service’s revenue (15.3% for 2026). The physical and download rate is 12.7 cents per track.
Registers works and, under the Music Modernization Act, designated the Mechanical Licensing Collective to administer the blanket mechanical licence (17 USC 115). The Register of Copyrights renewed the MLC’s designation in June 2026.
ASCAP and BMI operate under consent decrees, so the rates they may charge for public performance are set by the federal rate court for the Southern District of New York.
The international confederation that coordinates collecting societies across borders: the framework behind the reciprocal agreements that move performance royalties earned abroad back home.
Not every drop reaches the lake. These are the leaks in the terrain, shown on the map as the black box marsh and the dry creek bed on the eastern slope.
The MLC matches about 92% of usage to registered works, so roughly 8% of royalties go unmatched. Unmatched money must be held for at least three years. The MLC has announced plans to begin distributing long-unclaimed royalties to registered publishers by market share starting in early 2027.
SoundExchange holds royalties for rights owners it cannot locate for three years. Money earned is not money paid if the owner never registers or cannot be found.
A songwriter with no publisher or publishing administrator has no one collecting mechanicals or foreign performance royalties on their behalf. Those streams are never diverted into the river at all.
US law gives sound recordings no performance royalty on AM/FM broadcasts, so the recording side of terrestrial radio pays nothing: a creek that runs dry by statute. The composition side still earns from radio through the PROs.
Missing splits, inconsistent ISRCs, and unclaimed recordings strand money at every society on the map. The water is collected; it just never gets matched to the person it belongs to.