Internet radio is at a crossroads. On October 20th thousands of Internet radio stations are scheduled to begin paying royalty fees on songs they play and all the ones they have played in the last roughly three years. Those retroactive fees tally up to hefty bills for many smaller operators and many station owners maintain that October 20th will mark the end of Internet radio. But as this significant day approaches, there are some rumblings—after a slated House of Representatives vote on the topic did not happen—about a possible deal between the recording industry and Internet radio station operators.

Internet radio has been the legislative crosshairs ever since 1998. In October of that year, President Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a provision of that act gave recording copyright owners the right to charge fees to Internet Radio stations that played their copyrighted songs. The U.S. Copyright Office was put in charge of setting appropriate fees for Internet radio stations. It appointed three arbitrators to the task, and dubbed them the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP).

In February of this year, CARP recommended that radio stations on the Internet should be required to pay 0.014 cents per song per listener, and that they should pay retroactively for songs played over the past three and a half years. That recommendation was met with outrage from thousands of Internet radio stations, and the recommended fee was eventually cut in half, to 0.007 cents per song per listener. Cary Sherman, President of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said that the royalty fee reduction would result in "artists and record labels subsidizing the Webcasting businesses of multi-billion dollar companies like Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks and Viacom."