Yesterday in New York major record labels and SoundExchange have inked a deal with big webcasters like AOL, Live365, MTV, RealNetworks, Pandora and Yahoo! that the latter will not have to pay more than $50,000 per service as a per-station or per-channel minimum royalty to webcast sound recordings. So far there was no limit to the $500 per-channel or per-station minimum fee that services must pay to SoundExchange.
Also, large webcasters will not be required to implement any particular kind of technology to prevent the streamed music from being ripped by users, but the services have agreed to cooperate and discuss implementation of anti-stream ripping technology on their services with labels and artists.