Will web radio survive?

Internet radio has changed the way people listen to music across the world. There are around 10,000 Internet radio stations, each one different from the next, but these radio stations might not last long as the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has raised the royalties that web radio stations have to pay. While the big players like Yahoo and AOL who operate the majority of the radio stations will be fine, the smaller independent players might not be able to survive the new rates.

"These rates may effectively be high enough to kill the webcasting industry," ABI Research digital home research director Michael Wolf told the E-Commerce Times. The fees would roughly amount to at least US$5 per month for most webcasting stations, Wolf said.

I wonder if the radio stations I listen to on the web will survive? When we moved to Bangalore, our Internet was installed even before our luggage arrived and before we moved in, so while I was getting some work done in the apartment, it was web radio that kept me entertained all day long.