Combining hierarchical coding of data with receiver-driven control appears to be an attractive scheme for the multicast transmission of audio/video flows in a heterogeneous multicast environment such as the Internet. However, little experimental data is available regarding the actual performance of such schemes over the Internet. Previous work such as that on receiver driven layered multicast uses join experiments to choose the best quality signal a receiver can subscribe to. In this paper, we present a receiver-based multicast rate control mechanism based on a recently proposed TCP-friendly unicast mechanism. We have implemented this mechanism and evaluate its performance in conjunction with a simple layered audio coding scheme. We find that it has interesting convergence and performance properties, but also bring out its limitations.