Salt secures US music collection society The Mechanical Licensing Collective as new client to process rights and royalties for music creators to ensure ‘played gets paid’.

Next generation music society back-office SaaS platform Salt has signed a deal with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) to provide data matching services to improve music royalty distributions for music creators.

The MLC administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services in the United States, collecting royalties due under those licenses and paying music publishers and administrators; ex-U.S. collective management organizations (CMOs); and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.

Salt streamlines music rights & royalties from attribution to distribution, with a global network that’s flexible, accurate, high–speed and transparent.

The MLC, which has 32,000 members, has distributed over $1.5bn (€1.4bn, £1.2bn) in royalties to songwriters in the past two and half years since launching full operations in January 2021.

The announcement comes after Salt previously signed a 10-year deal to process over $3.4bn (€3bn, £2.6bn) of music royalties with BumaStemra, the Dutch music collection society representing the interests of music authors and publishers.

Salt’s board of directors include songwriter and producer Björn Ulvaeus, former Chief Executive of UK collection society PRS for Music Robert Ashcroft, and former Chief Executive of EMI Roger Faxon.

Salt CEO Doug Imrie said: “We’re delighted to be working with The MLC to help bring greater transparency and fairness to the US music industry.

“Music is one of the purest forms of creativity and Salt makes sure it’s fairly rewarded. “It plugs into existing back-office systems, processing usage, matching ownership and calculating distributions with cloud-powered speed and accuracy.

“With Salt, when it’s played, it gets paid.”

The new deal will supplement The MLC's existing internal capabilities, as well as the services already being provided by The MLC's existing vendors.

Andrew Mitchell, Head of Analytics & Automation at The MLC said: “We conducted an extensive due diligence process to ensure that we objectively selected the most suitable service providers from across the globe.

“Those chosen bring complementary technologies and capabilities that can be effectively leveraged to serve our members. This reflects our ongoing commitment to evolve in innovative ways to best achieve The MLC’s mission.”