There’s a tremendous amount of sound and fury around the webcasting issue – hard to know what (if anything) it’s signifying. If you need to be brought up to speed, check out the articles I've written about the issue here and here.

D-day for the new rates to be imposed—effectively killing webcasters great and small (from the kid in the dorm room to Pandora) was July 15th.  Well...dude in his dorm room is still webcasting, and Pandora is still doing their thing.

 So...what's up?  Well, as excellently-reported in Wired, while Congress refused to ban the new rates, the public outcry was so huge that it resulted in much Congressional response, and eventually SoundExchange agreeing to not immediately enforce the new rates.  Additionally, SoundExchange has put forth a modified proposal.

Don't celebrate yet, however.   Wired sums it up succinctly:

Under the new proposal, which must be implemented by the CRB, SoundExchange would cap the $500 annual per-channel minimum fee at $50,000 per year for webcasters. In exchange, webcasters could be required to provide more detailed data on the music that they play and make an effort to stop unauthorized copying from streamrippers -- software that can turn ephemeral net radio streams into permanent recordings. 

 While I think it is too early to celebrate, this certainly is the most sane approach to the issue in quite some time.  

My sense is that the large

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