The US Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) has announced four more tech partners for its ‘Data Quality Initiative’. It will be working with Blokur, Exactuals, Music Data Services and TuneRegistry on its efforts to ensure data on songs, writers and publishers in its database is as accurate as possible.

“They offer different tiers of service, from high-cost enterprise platforms to economical new software targeting self-administered songwriters and smaller publishers,” said Dae Bogan, head of third party partnerships at the MLC.

Meanwhile, the Music Technology Policy blog has spotted something interesting: a notice being sent on behalf of Apple to publishers in the US terminating their agreements because “we intend to move our licensing and royalty administration for Apple Music to the MLC starting from January 1, 2021”. Which isn’t unusual, but the letter’s mention of lyrics and cloud services agreements is making MTP’s editor wonder: “The MLC cannot license outside the blanket to my knowledge…”