The digital convergence has decimated the music industry, caused a strike in the movie industry, got the Library of Congress embroiled in a controversy over setting outrageous (and later overturned) royalty rates for internet radio, and allowed the music industry to wage war on its customers in the form of the lawsuits against illegal downloading.

It’s clear at this point that no one is going to get out of this transition clean. The latest fault line: The so-called mechanical royalties songwriters get for their work. Right now, songwriters get paid in a couple of complicated ways. One is the small amount—roughly nine cents, in theory—for each track on a CD that’s sold. The also get some other small amount, which varies in the five- to eight-cent range, each time a song they’ve written gets played on the radio.

(This is in contrast to the royalties the performer of a song on a particular record gets. The artists have a separate deal for royalties with the label releasing the records, and get no money for radio play, the idea being the radio play gives the artists free publicity.)

Anyway, on the mechanical royalties front, the Library of Congress, a board of which oversees royalties, is considering a couple of new proposals. In one, the music industry wants to lower the royalty rate for digital downloads. In this effort, they are joined by a new major player, the Digital Media Association, which includes companies like Apple and Amazon and Microsoft. (A full list of its members is here.)

A Hollywood Reporter story on the issue is here.

The music publishing industry, which represents songwriters, says the rate should be increased, on the grounds that the labels are making more proportionally off each download, because they don’t have to manufacture and package the music.

The figures debated are complicated and don’t quite make for apples-to-apples comparisons. The nine-cents-per-track CD rate is just nominal; the various ways record companies manipulate contracts and manhandle new artists in contract negotiations often produce much lower rates in practice.

Right now, the record industry wants an 8 percent royalty on gross revenues from downloading. Since, last I heard, the prevailing 99-cent iTunes purchase gives about 65 cents to a record company, that’s a ostensible royalty rate of a little over five cents per track.

The second issue before the copyright board is how to compensate songwriters for digital streaming. This gets down to a distinction that has bedeviled the royalty issue since the practice began. It’s pretty clear that when you buy a song from the iTunes store, it’s a purchase, just one lacking the physical dimension of a compact disc. But what’s exactly happening when you stream a song, though a subscription service? Is that a sale, triggering royalties–or a performance, which doesn’t?

The Digital Media Association, or DiMA, as it calls itself, unsurprisingly paints a picture of a delicate, fragile industry that make get killed a-bornin’ if royalty rates are too high:

“Fundamentally, this fragile marketplace is showing signs of promise, but it cannot be saddled with additional, excessive costs,” DiMA wrote. “The board should be careful not to impose a royalty that kills the proverbial goose and deprives songwriters and publishers of their golden egg.”

How other manifestations of the digital world will affect the real-world incomes of songwriters remains to be seen. For one, songwriter income from hit singles alone should rocket upwards. Music fans, instead of having to buy albums to get the one song they like, are now free to buy just the song for a quick and easy 99 cents. On the other hand, those tens of millions of album purchases now foregone will cost the songwriters who traditionally piggy-backed on the popularity of a hit song or two will now vaporize.