For years, online radio outfits were worried that aggressive royalty payment structures designed by the entertainment industry could force them out of business. For now, at least, it appears that those worries are over. After two years of negotiations between webcasters and copyright holders, the new deal has large webcasters paying copyright owners up to 25% of their revenue or a "per-performance" rate that's supposedly 40-50% lower than those previously set by the Copyright Royalty Board. Smaller webcasters will also pay either a percent of revenue or a percent of expenses. "For us, it's hard to overstate how significant this is," Pandora founder Tim Westergren says of the deal. "It was either this or an ugly alternative."