Yesterday marked the beginning of the end for many webcasters as the U.S. Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress James Billington announced the new royalty rates for webcasting music online.

Back in February, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) wanted webcasters to pay .14 cents per stream. The new rates will require webcasters to pay record labels .07 cents each time a song is streamed live and .02 cents for archived or simulcasted streams. Additionally, temporary or web server copies "that are used by webcasters in the transmission of performances of sound recordings" will cost webcasters 8.8 percent of their entire royalty fee. What's worse, however, is that the royalties will be retroactive back to 1998. With the fee structure officially set, webcasters will have 45 days to come up with the royalty payments.

Despite cutting the proposed rates in half, the new fee structure provides little solace to those who webcast music online as it will force many independent webcasters, who are already struggling financially, offline.

The damaging effects of these new fees can already be seen and heard as it has prompted SomaFM and Tag's Trance Trip to go offline. SomaFM reports that they've been "killed by the RIAA" because they'll be unable to pay the $500 a day CARP royalties which are "still way more than our revenues are." Others like Live365 will continue to exist for the time being, but they still face a huge fee of upwards of $1.5 million. And they'll have to figure out how to pay the $200,000 monthly fee.

Not surprisingly, Cary Sherman, President of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), believes that the rate "simply does not reflect the fair market value of the music as promised by the law."

There is hope, however. Lobbyist Jonathan Potter said that his organization (Digital Media Association) would approach Congress about overturning the fees and ask for more reasonable ones. And either side can appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.