Search Results for keywords:"commercial webcasters"

The Copyright Royalty Judges have announced a new value adjustment for the royalty rates paid by webcasters for playing sound recordings. Effective from January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2025, the rates account for changes in living costs. For commercial webcasters, the rate is set at $0.0032 per subscription performance and $0.0025 per nonsubscription performance. Noncommercial webcasters will pay $1,000 per channel annually, plus $0.0025 per performance for plays beyond a monthly limit of 159,140 listener hours.

The Copyright Royalty Judges received notices from SoundExchange, Inc. indicating their intent to audit royalty payments from commercial and non-commercial webcasters for the years 2021 to 2023. These audits will examine the accuracy of royalty payments made by companies like Beasley Mezzanine Holdings, iHeartMedia, and Family Stations, Inc., under statutory licenses. SoundExchange is responsible for collecting and distributing these royalties and can conduct such audits once a year to ensure compliance. This notice was published to fulfill the requirement of announcing these intentions in the Federal Register.

The Copyright Royalty Judges announced that they received notices from SoundExchange, Inc. to audit the financial reports for the years 2017, 2018, and 2019 from several commercial webcasting companies like Cumulus Media and Pandora Media, LLC. This audit is to ensure that the royalties due under certain licenses, which let these companies legally stream digital audio, have been paid correctly. SoundExchange is authorized to do such audits once a year, and they must notify both the companies involved and publish in the Federal Register within 30 days of filing the notice. This notice fulfills that requirement for the audits initiated by SoundExchange.