It's A Huge Day For Music Business

The US Copyright Royalty Board is due to make its decision over webcasting rates today (December 16). The stakes are extremely high, according to musicbusinessworld.com.

Morgan Stanley has forecast that a ‘good’ result (for record labels) could see Pandora’s stock price plummet 28% – worth an eye-watering $780M in market cap value.

That would be devastating for Pandora, which has already lost around $5B in value over the past 18 months.

But a ‘bad’ result for the record industry, says Morgan Stanley, would see Pandora’s value swing the other way by a similar amount.

For the past year, the CRB has been hearing evidence from both sides of this debate: the record labels and their rep/collection society SoundExchange, and the broadcasters, including Pandora and iHeartRadio. (SoundExchange also represents artists – and pays them directly.)

The CRB’s decision will set the webcasting per-stream rate paid by Pandora, iHeartRadio and others in the five years from 2016-2020.

The most significant party here for the music business, obviously enough, is Pandora, with its 78M listeners.