MRC Publishing and the continuity of rights, from catalog to revenue
On September 10, 2026, The Music Royalty Co announced the launch of MRC Publishing, a new publishing company bringing together administration, rights management, royalty collection and distribution, income tracking, sync licensing and pitching. The expansion might seem relatively natural for a company already established in royalty management and rights administration, yet the arrival of synchronization within this structure shifts the perspective slightly, because MRC Publishing is not simply bringing several services together around the same client. By placing the registration of a work, its administration, its exploitation and the tracking of the revenue it generates within the same structure, the company is bringing together functions that intervene at different points in the economic life of the same right... and it is precisely within the space that previously separated them that something is beginning to move.
Klem Loden
9/17/20264 min read
When pitching meets administration
Founded in 2014 by Ray Bush, The Music Royalty Co developed around royalty management, rights administration and accounting services specialized in the music industry. With MRC Publishing, the company is now extending that scope by offering publishing deals alongside services covering copyright and rights management, royalty collections and distributions, income tracking, sync licensing and pitching.
The composition of its leadership tells the story of this convergence rather well. Andy Hegarty brings experience from Warner Chappell, Ali Rigby leads The Music Royalty Co and Ray Bush, MRC’s founder, is also a co-founder of Curve Royalty Systems, thus bringing expertise spanning publishing, royalties, rights management, systems and music finance into a single structure whose scope now extends into the creative exploitation of the catalog.
MRC presents this expansion as a response to the growing complexity of publishing income, now distributed across territories, collecting societies and digital platforms, with the ambition of giving songwriters, publishers and rights holders greater visibility, confidence and control. Andy Hegarty summarizes the objective through a particularly revealing sequence of four operations, ensuring that works are properly “registered, tracked, pitched and paid,” an order that matters because, from the first of these operations to the last, the entire economic circulation of the right ultimately begins to emerge.
One work, several operational realities
A work obviously does not change its nature as it moves from registration to pitching, then from licensing to revenue collection, yet its exploitation passes through several functions, systems and intermediaries that do not necessarily handle the same representation of it, nor at the same moment.
Before it is pitched, the work already exists as a set of rights to identify and information to register. When a synchronization opportunity arises, that administrative reality encounters a form of creative exploitation that, in turn, relies on information concerning the rights, the permissions and the parties capable of granting them, then, once the license has been concluded, the placement does not bring the economic life of the work to an end either, since the resulting revenues must still be identified, tracked, collected and distributed.
MRC Publishing obviously does not eliminate this complexity and nothing in the information made public at the time of the launch allows us to claim that bringing these functions together within the same organization will eliminate the friction that exists between them. The model does, however, reveal a particular way of approaching that friction, by preserving greater continuity around the same asset as it moves from one function to another.
MRC also states that it has already “unlocked value” for the catalog of its current roster, without publishing figures or sufficient detail to determine where that value had been lost, how it was recovered or which specific function made it possible to reveal it. The claim therefore cannot serve as evidence of the superiority of an integrated model, but it does illuminate rather precisely what the company intends to offer beyond the mere addition of its services, a more continuous representation of the catalog’s economic value.
Where the boundary begins to become porous
This is where the launch becomes particularly interesting for synchronization, since creative and administrative functions have long been viewed as two neighboring territories, with pitching, licensing and the search for opportunities occupying one, while work registration, tracking, statements, collection and distribution occupied the other. That separation remains perfectly real across much of the market, only the model presented by MRC Publishing allows us to observe what happens when an actor historically built around the second territory decides to move directly into the first.
Better administration will not necessarily produce more placements and the available data provide no basis for establishing such a relationship, any more than a royalty infrastructure becomes a synchronization infrastructure simply because both functions now live under the same roof. What can be observed is more subtle, since an actor historically positioned around the financial tracking of catalogs is choosing to integrate licensing and pitching into its scope at the very moment it identifies the fragmentation of publishing income as one of the difficulties rights holders must navigate.
The boundary does not disappear... it becomes more porous, and administration and exploitation may gradually cease to be understood as two independent operations applied to the same catalog at different moments, instead becoming two points within the same circulation, that of a right whose value must be identifiable before its exploitation, mobilized when an opportunity arises, then found again when that exploitation begins to generate revenue.
Not losing the right along the way
For synchronization, the structural significance of MRC Publishing may lie precisely here, since a placement never exists solely at the moment when music meets an image. That encounter is obviously its most visible part, but it rests upon an operational reality that existed before it and continues after it, with the right needing to be identifiable, represented and licensed before the value created through its exploitation can, in turn, be tracked back to those to whom it belongs.
When these different stages exist within separate infrastructures, the catalog passes through several systems, functions and intermediaries over the course of that journey. MRC Publishing proposes to shorten part of that distance by bringing together, within the same structure, functions that were already operating on the same right without necessarily operating together.
It will take more than the announcement of a launch to determine whether this continuity actually improves administrative efficiency, revenue recovery or the synchronization performance of the catalogs concerned, since no public data yet allow such a conclusion to be drawn. The movement itself nevertheless deserves attention, because it shifts the question of catalog value toward something less visible than its size, its repertoire or even its placement opportunities, the ability to preserve a sufficiently coherent representation of the right throughout its circulation.
“Registered, tracked, pitched and paid” could therefore be read as the simple succession of four operations belonging to four different moments in the life of a work, until a single structure decides to bring them together within one continuity.
Verified Sources and References
The Music Royalty Co, “We’ve Launched A Brand New Publishing Company: MRC Publishing,” September 2026.
Record of the Day, “The Music Royalty Co. Launches Publishing Company: MRC Publishing,” September 10, 2026.
Music Week, “The Music Royalty Co launches MRC Publishing to provide admin services,” September 11, 2026.