Doug Collins, a conservative Republican from rural Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, likes pretty much the type of music you’d expect from someone in his rank and station. His desert island albums are by Meat Loaf and the Eagles. He’s amped about having caught a couple of AC/DC live shows: “Any band that puts cannons onstage, that’s worth seeing.” He also happens to be a leading architect of what would be the biggest change to music royalties in the last 20 years.

In December, Collins introduced the Music Modernization Act (MMA), a 109-page piece of legislation he claims “would literally usher copyright laws into the 21st century.” A Senate version followed a month later. Born from a year of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the proposed law has bipartisan support and—unusual for music-related efforts in Congress—endorsements by lobbying groups representing a broad swath of the industry, from record labels and publishers to streaming services and FM broadcasters. (Some of the bill’s advocates have argued that it should pass because this time, for once, it could pass.) Provisions of Collins’ bill are expected to be included as part of a package that the Grammys’ policy chief has expressed “very high confidence” will make it onto President Donald Trump’s desk sometime this year.

Parts of music’s current copyright law date back to 1909, when policy was written for the age of player pianos; the last major overhaul came in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So needless to say, the MMA is long overdue. But since it will likely shape how artists make money for decades to come, reading the fine print is crucial. Though lawmakers are describing the MMA as a “consensus bill,” most of that consensus appears to have been between lobbyists at the negotiating table. While publishing and record-label trade groups advocating for the MMA claim they have cosigns from more than 26,000 songwriters, some in the industry question how much these survey respondents were really told about the nitty gritty. This bill simply shouldn’t be crammed through before the rest of the music community understands what it is and offers ways to improve it. And it’s not just that working-class musicians haven’t been invited to the table—it’s also that the biggest artist advocates they could find are folks like Dionne Warwick and Steven Tyler, neither exactly representative of where songwriting is headed and where royalties should follow.

A quick music-copyright primer: There are two sets of copyrights on a piece of recorded music, one for the sound recording itself and another for the underlying musical composition (lyrics, notes, chords, and so on). The MMA focuses on the composition side, where the royalties are usually split between the songwriters and their publishers, and more specifically on mechanical royalties. To distribute someone’s song on any format (CD, vinyl, legal streaming services), you’re required to get a mechanical license from the copyright owner, and then pay mechanical royalties for every copy (or stream) at a rate set by the federal government. (There are also performance royalties, which are collected by groups like ASCAP and BMI when a composition is broadcast or used in public, but we’ll get back to those later.)

As streaming has grown to account for more than 60 percent of the recording industry’s revenue, securing mechanical licenses and paying out the royalties has turned into a huge mess. Songwriters and publishers have sued Spotify for allegedly using their songs without getting a mechanical license (one lawsuit settled last year for $43 million, and another asking for $1.6 billion is still ongoing). Spotify has thrown up its hands about the difficulty of finding out who owns the mechanical rights in the first place. The MMA would replace the current system, which involves streaming services filing millions of “Notice of Intention” (NOI) letters with the Copyright Office, by creating something called the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). Streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, YouTube, and Apple Music would would pay the MLC for a “blanket” license that would allow them to use anything in its database, and the MLC would be in charge of divvying up mechanicals payouts to songwriters and publishers. Streaming services would also be protected from lawsuits over mechanical royalties and licenses for music streamed before January 1, 2018.