Major record labels and SoundExchange have reached a deal with webcasting services over covering royalty rates that webcasters must pay to stream sound recordings through 2010.

Commercial webcasters including AOL, Live365, MTV, RealNetworks, Pandora and Yahoo! will not have to pay more than $50,000 per service as a per-station or per-channel minimum royalty to webcast sound recordings.

Large webcasters will not be required to implement any kind of technology to prevent the streamed music from being ripped, i.e. copied, by users, — but, the services have agreed to cooperate and discuss implementation of anti-stream ripping technology on their services with labels and artists. (Billboard)

Total U.S. Market:

Online radio (Yahoo!, AOL, Clear Channel, and Live 356) – 29 million people listen each week.

Terrestrial radio – 230 million weekly listeners

Satellite radio – 14 million weekly listeners