Following the news that The Orchard had agreed a licensing agreement with Pandora, Last FM have now established a similar agreement - as featured in Digital Music News

 

The Orchard is now licensing its catalog for use within Last.fm, a quickly-growing, music-focused social network.  The move will push over one million tracks from independent artists into the Last.fm sphere, an involved system of targeted music recommendations.  The Orchard content will be integrated into the radio-based component of the offering, which allows users to sample new music and fine tune their preferences.

 

In a statement, Viacom claims that just under 160,000 unauthorised clips of Viacom programmes, including 'The Daily Show' and 'South Park', have been made available for free through YouTube and have been viewed around 1.5bn times in total.

 

Streaming radio broadcasters are now considering legal action against a recently-revised royalty structure issued by the Copyright Royalty Board.  The ruling, which replaces percentage-based royalties with per-play calculations, is widely being viewed as a death sentence for small- and mid-size webcasters.  "Right now the thought is that the initial response needs to be a legal response," NPR station WXPN general manager Roger LaMay recently told internetnews.com.

As one can imagine the fall out from the royalty rates set by the CRB in the US has been somewhat negative.  Most reports are predicting the demise of a large number of US online broadcasters. RAIN is leading the cavalry in fighting the decision.

 

Webcasters across the country have begun an organized effort to mobilize listeners in the fight to keep their operations save the streamsonline.

Faced with last week's Copyright Royalty Board decision, which threatens to shutter the huge majority of Internet radio operations in the U.S., webcast audiences are rushing to respond, signing online petitions and calling the attention of their elected officials to the Webcasters' struggle.