The Fair Play Fair Pay Act aims to change the way musicians are compensated for their work. PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN WALDIE / GETTY

It’s common knowledge that the music business has been battered for years. The main culprit is the Internet, which has destroyed the market for albums, and the main victims have been musicians, whose income and options have plummeted. A bipartisan proposal recently introduced in Congress attempts to give musicians a little help by remedying an injustice that is decades older than iTunes.

The proposed law, known as the Fair Play Fair Pay Act, is born of unusual parentage. Its lead sponsors in the House of Representatives are Jerrold Nadler, who represents Manhattan and ranks as one of the most liberal legislators in Congress, and Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, one of the most conservative. If the two of them can find common ground on this issue, maybe the rest of Congress can, too.

The root of the problem is easy to understand. Around the turn of the last century, the only way to buy music was in sheet form—notes on a page. Copyright law protected songwriters’ creations for a certain extended period of time. (How long depended on when they were created, due to repeated changes in copyright law.) Once radio took hold, copyright law commanded that the owners of AM/FM stations pay royalties to the songwriters (who wrote the notes on the page) or to whoever had acquired the music’s publication rights (starting in the seventies, this included the rights to particular recordings), but not to the musicians who performed the music. After 1972, there were additional provisions, including ones to, essentially, pay these royalties on different covers of the same song. But the law never really caught up to technology. The only countries that don’t pay performers for their work on the radio are, amazingly, China, Iran, North Korea—and the United States.

At the moment, performers as well as songwriters are, for the most part, paid royalties for music played on the Internet on services like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. (The new law would also require Internet music providers to pay such royalties on songs created before 1972, which some outfits decline to provide.) The existing royalties to performers are often pitifully small, but they are better than nothing—which is what performers now receive from terrestrial radio, as AM/FM is known. The details of the proposed law can get very complicated—there are even some distinctions between satellite and Internet radio. But the Fair Play Fair Pay Act sensibly attempts to create one basic system for all forms of music transmission that pays the musicians as well as the authors of the underlying work.

Critics of the proposed law argue that radio play gives musicians exposure and promotion that they can then monetize in later sales of music or concert tickets. As a recent piece in the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, asserted, “While record label revenues have plummeted, the glitz and glamor at the MTV Video Music Awards should be proof enough that artists and the industry are still finding financial success.”

But glitz and glamour don’t pay a musician’s bills—and, in any case, few musicians enjoy glitzy lives. The “promotional” argument is a sucker’s game, one that is familiar to writers of prose as well as songs. Even after the advent of the Internet, radio remains a big, profitable business that still relies, to a great extent, on music to win listeners. If the radio stations are still making money (as most are), there’s every reason to share some of that wealth with those whose work is indispensable to the final product.

The Fair Play law does raise difficult questions of implementation. The bill proposes a system that attempts to compensate performers without penalizing songwriters. In addition, it attempts to accommodate smaller radio stations by allowing them to pay a flat fee rather than a per-song fee. These provisions can certainly be amended or improved. But the basic point—that musicians should be paid for their labor—should be at the core of any solution.

The music business is at a paradoxical crossroads. Listeners consume more music in more ways and in more places than at any time in history. Many Americans spend their waking hours with buds in their ears: walking down the street, commuting, even when working. This kind of immersion in music was never previously possible. But this abundance has not meant prosperity for the people who make it possible—quite the opposite. The proposed law, while hardly a panacea, offers a small corrective, and a little cash, to the artists who create the sounds for the rest of us.