Webcasting royalties set in 2026: what radio simulcasters, public radio and college stations pay to 2030

On March 10, 2026, the Copyright Royalty Judges published four final rules in the Federal Register setting what several kinds of internet radio services in the United States must pay to stream sound recordings from January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2030. The rules, effective that day, come from the proceeding known as Web VI and cover AM/FM broadcasters that stream online, public radio stations, noncommercial educational webcasters such as college stations, and Educational Media Foundation. Each rule adopts a settlement between SoundExchange, the organization that collects these royalties, and the services' representatives, a step the judges described as largely ministerial.

The license behind the rates

Noninteractive internet radio services can stream sound recordings under statutory licenses in sections 112(e) and 114 of the Copyright Act, at rates the judges set for five-year periods. Services pay SoundExchange, which the rules name as the collective that collects and distributes the money to sound recording copyright owners and performers. Under each of the four rules, 5% of payments counts as the royalty for the temporary copies made to transmit the music, and the rest as the royalty for the performances themselves.

For per-play rates, a performance is each time any part of a sound recording is transmitted to one listener. Incidental uses do not count, such as brief transitions in and out of commercials, brief music during news, talk or sports, or short performances in ads of 60 seconds or less, provided they do not include a whole recording or feature one for more than 30 seconds.

Who pays what

The broadcaster rate climbs by $0.0001 per performance, or 10 cents per thousand performances, each year: $0.0029 in 2027, $0.0030 in 2028 and $0.0031 in 2029. The minimum fee, which is credited against the year's royalties, covers each channel and each station, but a broadcaster's total minimum fees are capped at 100 times the per-channel amount. The rule defines a commercial broadcaster as a commercial webcaster a material part of whose business is owning and operating AM or FM stations licensed by the Federal Communications Commission.

The other groups pay differently. Public radio's single license fee covers a large group of stations and rises by $25,000 a year. The Educational Media Foundation's annual fee rises 4% a year by our calculation and is paid monthly. College and other noncommercial educational webcasters pay a flat minimum as long as no channel or station tops 160,000 aggregate tuning hours in a month, plus a $100 annual proxy fee if they elect a reporting waiver; above that level, they pay the rates for other noncommercial webcasters.

How it compares with the last period

Under the previous rates for 2021 to 2025, commercial webcasters paid rates adjusted each year for inflation from a base of $0.0021 per nonsubscription performance. For 2025, the judges put the rate at $0.0032 per subscription performance and $0.0025 per nonsubscription performance, noting no increase that year in the nonsubscription rate. By our calculation, the broadcasters' 2026 rate of $0.0028 is 12% higher than 2025's nonsubscription rate, and the broadcasters' new schedule sets a fixed amount for each year instead of a yearly inflation formula.

To put the rate in listener terms (our illustration): a broadcaster streaming 10 songs an hour to 1,000 listeners makes 10,000 performances, which at the 2026 rate costs $28 in royalties for that hour.

How the judges adopted them

The settlements were first published as proposed rules: the college webcasters' on October 11, 2024, the broadcasters' and public radio's on May 16, 2025, and the foundation's on December 4, 2025. No participant in Web VI objected. The judges said the law then directed them to adopt the settlements and that doing so was “principally a ministerial function,” and the Register of Copyrights reviewed each final rule for legal error and issued no corrections. The rules are dated February 25 and 26, 2026, ahead of their March 10 publication.

What applies now

The four rules apply to the license period that began on January 1, 2026, and runs to December 31, 2030. The Federal Register's records for the Copyright Royalty Board, which we searched on November 12, 2026, show no later rule changing them. The settlements do not cover commercial webcasters that do not own AM or FM stations, and the same records show no final rule yet setting their 2026-2030 rates.

The board has already begun its next round. Notices published on December 31, 2025, started proceedings for satellite radio and for public broadcasting, each for 2028 to 2032, and for making and distributing phonorecords, known as Phonorecords V, where a proposed partial settlement was published on July 10, 2026. For how radio companies' streaming and broadcast revenue is moving, see our report on iHeartMedia's third quarter.