Ever thought that the streaming music you hear for free on sites like last.fm and Spotify costs? You’d be right in thinking so. Somebody has to pay a royalty for that music you don’t pay a penny for. That’s why music streaming sites have to place advertisements to fund the costs of music streaming fees.

Yesterday, the Performing Right Society altered the royalties owed on streaming music tracks. The fee for each streamed track is now 0.085p, compared to the previous 0.22p.

It is rumoured that this change has been made in order to persuade sites like Youtube and Pandora to start allowing streamed music. Youtube stopped allowing music videos in the UK earlier this year due to a failure of agreement with the PRS, so hopefully this new low cost royalty will encourage Youtube to start streaming music again.

It would be nice to see some official bands back on Youtube again. Although last.fm and Spotify are great for free music streaming, Youtube became well known for watching music videos online.

We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks – Youtube may well start allowing music again, but I personally think that it’ll take quite a lot of persuasion. Youtube is currently the 3rd most popular site on the internet (and has been for some time), so Google (the owner of Youtube) may decide that it is not worth paying music streaming fees again. Youtube doesn’t seem to have lost many visitors since it stopped streaming music videos.