NAB and SoundExchange make deal.

Radio Ink and other journals are reporting that NAB and SoundExchange have made a deal:

"The new agreement keeps the per-performance rate structure but reduces the rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board for 2009 and 2010 by about 16 percent and establishes rates for 2011-2015. This year's rate is $0.0015 per streamed recording, moving up to $0.0025 in 2015. The CRB rates were $0.0018 for 2009 and $0.0019 for 2010."

For a station that plays music 24/7, and assuming 10 songs per hour, this equates to about $11 (in 2009) scaling to $18 (in 2015) per concurrent listener per month (or AQH persons) for their internet broadcasts... or in listener hours, 1.5 cents (2009) to 2.5 cents (2015) per listener hour per month for internet streams.

For a station doing 150,000 hours a month (205 average concurrent listeners per month) that would be around $2250 a month in SoundExchange royalties. 150,000 hours a month is typical of a lot of larger-market FM simulcast netcasts, to that's a typical number.

But we have way more listeners on net than that, and do more like 3 million listener hours (counting only US listeners). So SomaFM would be paying over $45,000 a MONTH at these rates. (Actually more, because without commercials, we play more songs per hour than an AM/FM station does.)

The only way this makes sense for broadcasters is if they're predominately talk or they're getting waivers in exchange for airplay of tracks.