Kurt Hanson, the newsletter publisher of RAIN and also a webcaster himself through AccuRadio, tells Radio-Info – “I've been in this field for almost 10 years, and this is the first day in which there have been viable royalty rates, available for a reasonably long period of time.” It affects “pure-play” webcasters, not terrestrial broadcasters who stream. But it gives the pure-plays like Pandora a discount from the rates already agreed to by the very large webcasters such as Yahoo. SoundExchange is the clearinghouse for the labels and rightsholders and it offers webcasters the option to take the new “pure play” license. The deal just announced creates three categories of webcasters, says RAIN – large, small and those that offer “bundled, syndicated or subscription services.” A “small” webcaster is one whose revenues are under $1.25 million and whose listener-hours are less than about 10 million hours. Read the RAIN coverage of what looks like an historic deal, with a chart of the rates and breakout of categories, here. And you can join the Radio-Info.com discussion, here: