The brouhaha over royalties owed to artists and content providers for streaming music and audio programming via the Internet is changing…but is filled with as much drama as ever. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has reached a new royalty agreement with SoundExchange, a non-profit performance rights organization tasks with collecting royalties for so-called “non-interactive” digital transmissions. The agreement sets royalty rates for radio broadcasters who also run online streams; rates for 2009 and 2010 are reduced by about 16 percent from the rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board in the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008, then will climb to about a quarter-cent per streamed sound recording by the year 2015.
