The smallest defensible number
The most cited figure in modern music rights is $561 million. It refers to historical unmatched mechanical royalties held by the Mechanical Licensing Collective in the United States during the early years following the Music Modernization Act.
It is widely used as evidence of inefficiency. It is also the floor, not the ceiling. One country. One rights type. One collection entity. One defined accumulation period. The arithmetic beyond that point is not speculative. It is structural.
The base case
The MLC's own reporting now shows $397.2 million in historical unmatched royalties collected, $201.4 million distributed, and $195.8 million remaining unmatched. The original $561 million figure reflects earlier reporting of the same underlying condition, a large pool of royalties collected but not matched to rights holders at the point of distribution.
The mechanism is consistent. Usage occurs. Royalties are collected. Matching fails or is incomplete. Funds accumulate. After a statutory holding period, residual amounts are redistributed by market share. This is not unique to the United States. It is the standard operating condition of collective rights management globally.
Multiply by rights type
The MLC administers digital mechanical royalties. That is one of three primary categories.
- Mechanical. Reproduction rights. The MLC sits here.
- Performance. Public performance rights. Larger in aggregate in many territories. More dependent on survey-based allocation. PRS, ASCAP, BMI, SACEM, GEMA all report undistributed or pending balances each year, with varying disclosure practices.
- Neighbouring rights. Recording-side performance income. Collected by PPL, GVL, SENA, Gramex and equivalents. Heavily reliant on performer registration and reciprocal agreements. Widely considered the least efficiently claimed stream in recorded music.
If mechanicals alone produce a nine-figure unmatched pool in a single territory, the question is what equivalent inefficiencies look like across the other two.
Multiply by geography
The MLC represents one territory. Global rights collection is coordinated through the CISAC network, with 230-plus member societies across 120-plus territories. CISAC's most recent reporting places total global creator collections at approximately €13.1 billion annually, spanning performance, mechanical, and other creator income streams.
That figure does not capture every recording-side flow, nor every neighbouring-rights system. The global system is large. The inefficiencies scale with it.
A conservative model
Working from observed system behaviour, three variables matter. The unmatched rate at first distribution. The resolution rate over time. The residual pool that enters redistribution.
MLC data suggests an initial unmatched rate of roughly fifteen to twenty percent before reprocessing. Other societies do not publish directly comparable figures, but operational evidence suggests similar orders of magnitude. Resolution rates over time appear to recover roughly fifty to seventy percent.
Applied to €13.1 billion of CISAC-reported collections, an unmatched rate of ten to twenty percent produces an initial pool of $1.4 billion to $2.8 billion. Resolution leaves a residual range of roughly $400 million to $1.2 billion for performance and mechanical alone.
Add neighbouring rights
PPL distributes hundreds of millions of pounds annually. GVL exceeds €200 million. These systems carry lower registration completeness, higher cross-border dependency, and greater fragmentation. A conservative addition of $200 million to $500 million in residual unmatched neighbouring rights globally is defensible. The actual figure is likely higher.
Multiply by time
The MLC figure captures a defined period. Global rights systems operate continuously. Unmatched income is generated each cycle, partially resolved, partially carried forward, partially redistributed. A ten-year view compounds the effect. A thirty- to forty-year catalogue horizon amplifies it further.
The system that produced the $561 million figure operates everywhere. The arithmetic does not require speculation. Only multiplication.
The defensible range
Combining rights-type expansion, geographic scaling, and time-layering produces an order-of-magnitude range. A conservative view sits at $1 billion to $2 billion. A mid-range view sits at $2 billion to $4 billion. An aggressive but arguable view exceeds $5 billion.
These are not precise totals. They are bounded estimates grounded in observed system behaviour. No single entity reports a global unmatched total. Disclosure practices differ. Some redistribution mechanisms obscure residual amounts. The absence of a published number does not indicate absence of the condition. It reflects fragmentation of reporting.
Close
$561 million is a useful number. It is also incomplete, because it describes a single instance of a global condition. One country. One rights type. One period.
The system that produced it operates everywhere. The realistic scale is measured in billions, not millions.