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After years of wrangling and imminent doom constantly hanging over their heads, Pandora and other webcasters like AOL Radio have finally managed to work out a new deal with the music industry that should ensure the survival of their businesses for the next few years. Under this deal, large webcasters with revenue over $1.25 million will pay the greater of 25% of their revenue, or a fixed price per song, which will increase from 0.08 cents to 0.14 cents in 2015. Services with less than $1.25 million in revenue will have to pay 12 to 14% of their revenue.

eMusic, one of the world's largest subscription-based music retailers, has for the first time added music from Sony's catalog to its store. Most users on eMusic subscribe to the service because of the eclectic selection of independent music it offers, and very few users were excited to hear that eMusic was going to make major changes to its service, including raising the price per song just in order to give its users access to mainstream music that they were not very likely to be interested in. While eMusic did a fine job at communicating the basic changes to the service, it didn't reveal the full extent of the changes until yesterday, and its users are anything but happy about them.

Just a few weeks ago, Google started to block music videos on YouTube in England, after its negotiations with the UK's artistic royalty-collecting body PRS for Music failed because of disagreements about the price of the license and a lack of transparency. Today, Google's negotiations with the German music rights association GEMA also failed, and Google will now block music videos in Germany as well. Google's contract with GEMA expired yesterday, after the two parties failed to come to an agreement about the price of a new license.