Doubly Blackbox Checker
Find and claim your unclaimed MLC music royalties
Doubly Blackbox Checker is a free tool that shows which of your recordings are unregistered or unclaimed at The MLC, and roughly what that's costing you. Paste a Spotify artist, album, or song link — or search by name — and it scans your catalog against MLC data, labeling each recording with a clear status and sizing the money stuck behind it. No signup is required to run a check. The MLC is holding $656M nobody has claimed. Starting January 14, 2027, the first $6.41M (from January 2021 usage) gets paid out by market share to publishers and writers already collecting, and once a usage month is distributed it's gone forever. This tool surfaces the recordings at risk so you can fix them before your name is left out. It's built for songwriters, publishers, and catalog administrators who need a quick, grounded view of how much of their mechanical royalties are sitting in the black box.
Use Cases
- Songwriters checking whether their recordings are fully claimed at The MLC
- Publishers reviewing an entire roster's exposure to the black box payout
- Catalog administrators identifying recordings that need per-service matching
- Songwriters confirming that registered, fully claimed works are actually matched on services like Spotify
- Checking whether a recording exists in MLC data at all before registering the work
- Estimating which unclaimed or unmatched recordings cost the most mechanical royalties
