SoundExchange, Large Webcasters Reach Deal

Written by Frank Smith

Thursday, August 23. 2007 at 05:02 PM EDT Post a comment

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SoundExchange has completed closed-door meetings today with large webcasters over royalty rates. Under the new terms of the deal AOL, Live365, MTV, RealNetworks, Pandora, and Yahoo's payments will be capped at $50,000 per service and per-station/channel.

Also, the streamripping debate has been dropped. So webcasters won't be forced to lock down their streams to prevent recordings, which while that might have created some boom times for the streamripping DRM business (is there such a thing?), those efforts can be better spent creating algorithms (friendly robots?) to enhance music discovery. But they will have to contact labels to discuss ways to implement this technology.

No agreement has been announced yet for the small webcasters. SoundExchange sent out an offer to qualified small webcasters offering reduced royalty rates through 2010.