As an addendum to the Last.fm story today, what are the actual royalty rates we’re talking here? They’re not much – precisely the reason musicians will have to get broadcast-style play counts to ever see anything worth counting. For instance, Last.fm makes the comparison with the BBC in the Wired story. The BBC has more hegemony than even a giant US ClearChannel radio station, and I suspect it’d be virtually impossible for an unsigned artist to see that number of plays.

How little? Try $0.0005 per play, as Steve of sighup writes in comments. (I think that’s just radio plays; assuming you get both radio and on-demand plays, you should do a little better – but, still, you might be better off with your CD sales out of your guitar case.) Keep in mind, that’s on top of other revenue, like performance royalties from ASCAP, BMI, and such, but it’s still not much.

Low as that may sound, it’s in the same ballpark as traditional webcasting rates. Prior to the big shake-up over Copyright Royalty Board rates here in the US, its rate was US$0.0008. And that’s only in the US, whereas Last.fm is international – and some of that goes to SoundExchange, and some goes to your label, and … you get the picture.