Despite constant gridlocks, a government shutdown, and an approval rating so low it couldn’t get into a European bar, Congress may be ready to update music licensing laws for the first time in 20 years. A bill called the Music Modernization Act has been introduced in the House and Senate over the past month, and it is designed to streamline the music licensing process to make it easier for rights holders to get paid when their music is streamed online.

The two bipartisan bills look to revamp Section 115 of the U.S. Copyright Act, with three major changes:

• It would create a new governing agency, which would issue blanket mechanical licenses to digital services, and collect and distribute royalties to rights holders. (This wouldn’t prevent rights holders like major labels from entering into licensing agreements with digital services.) Currently, services like Spotify and Apple Music are responsible for identifying the rights holders to each individual song in their catalogs — a job that would switch to the new entity in this bill. Digital services would pay the operating costs for the unnamed entity.
• Mechanical royalties would be paid to songwriters whenever a copy of their track is made (be it physical or digital), and it would be based on what a buyer and seller negotiate in an open market, instead of the current rate-setting standards.
• The rate court system would be overhauled. Currently, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), the two largest music performance rights organizations in the country, are assigned a single judge who handles all of their rate court cases. The bill proposes that a district judge in New York’s Southern District would be randomly assigned to each case going forward. The bill would also repeal Section 114(i) of the U.S. Copyright Act which prevents rate courts from considering sound recording royalty rates when setting performance royalty rates.