There is a pool of hundreds of millions of dollars in mechanical royalties that has been earned by real songs and paid by the streaming services, but never reached the people who wrote those songs. It is called the black box. If you are an independent artist or songwriter, some of it may be yours, and the only reason you have not been paid is paperwork.
Every time your song is streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon or any US service, it generates a mechanical royalty for the composition. In the United States, that money is collected by The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC). The MLC can only pay you if your composition is correctly registered to you. When a song is not registered, or is registered with wrong or missing writer data, the money still gets collected, it just has nowhere to go. It accrues in the unmatched pool. That pool is the black box, and it holds hundreds of millions of dollars.
Most independent artists collect exactly one of the five royalty streams their music generates, the streaming payout from their distributor. The other four, including US mechanicals at The MLC, require separate registration that no distributor does for you automatically. We have audited catalogs with thousands of works frozen in exactly this state. The artist was making music, getting streams, and quietly leaking the mechanical royalty on every single play.
There has historically been no easy way to see your own status. The MLC offers a Missing Member Lookup, but it only shows you if they have already flagged you by name. It does not tell you, song by song, whether your specific works are registered.
That is exactly what the Royalty X-Ray does. You enter your artist name and up to three song titles, and it queries The MLC public registry live and tells you, per song, whether your composition is registered for US mechanical royalties. Songs that come back not found are the ones leaking into the black box right now.
Check your songs against the real registries in 10 seconds. No signup. No card.
CHECK MY SONGS , FREEYou will find plenty of royalty calculators online that ask for your follower count and show you a big scary number. That is marketing math, an estimate, not your actual situation. The Royalty X-Ray does the opposite. It checks the registries where royalty ownership actually lives, The MLC, BMI/ASCAP Songview, and SoundExchange, and shows you which streams are connected to your bank account and which are pouring into someone else's. A guess motivates you. A scan tells you what to fix.
If your songs are unregistered, the fix is straightforward but tedious: register the compositions at The MLC, make sure your writer data is clean at BMI or ASCAP so performance royalties are not frozen, open a SoundExchange account for digital-radio money, and where the back-pay is still claimable, claim it. We do this work for artists every day, we filed 2,214 works at The MLC in a single week. If you would rather keep the crown and let someone carry the paperwork, that is what Khaled Media Publishing Administration is for: zero to start, one written commission, and your rights stay yours.