Webcasting royalty rates in the United States have just gone up, including a doubling of the minimum annual payment for noncommercial webcasters.
The Copyright Royalty Judges on Friday announced new rates for webcasters for 2021 through 2025.
The rate for commercial nonsubscription services in 2021 will be $0.0021 per performance, up from $0.0018 last year. For commercial subscription services it will be $0.0026, up from $0.0024. Rates for the ensuing four years will be tweaked based on the Consumer Price Index.
The rate for noncommercial webcasters (except educational) has doubled to $1,000 a year per station or channel, for transmissions totaling up to 159,140 Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH) in a month.
If a noncom webcaster goes beyond that number on a given channel or station, the per-performance fee this year is $0.0021 for the additional transmissions, up from $0.0018. Again it may change in 2022 to 2025 based on the CPI.
Webcasters will have some back payments to make as a result. The Copyright Royalty Board had delayed issuing its rates for the new five-year period until spring. Commercial and noncommercial webcasters were told by SoundExchange to use 2020 rates in the meantime but that adjustments would be retroactive to Jan. 1.
Note that rates for other categories — noncommercial educational webcasters, satellite radio, audio for business establishments and certain others — are on a different calendar cycle, so their 2021 rates were already known. Those can be found at the SoundExchange website.
