It’s the lobbying equivalent of dueling banjos: Broadcasters and musicians are performing a door-knock battle this week over a bill that would require radio stations to pay royalties to performers.

Artists say it’s a matter of property rights.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) argues that stations should not pay because they are providing free promotion to musicians. The benefit of higher radio play comes in higher record sales.

The issue of royalties could take on more prominence, however, because of a corresponding push from the other side on an issue that has caused bad blood between stations and musicians for decades.

John Simson, executive director of Sound Exchange, a company that collects royalties, calls the debate a “basic issue of fairness.”

“It is completely and fundamentally unfair to create something and then not have the right to get paid for it,” Simson said.

Sound Exchange and the Recording Industry Association of America are sponsoring musicians to come to town and counter NAB’s lobbying push.

Also, the Music First coalition, a group representing artists, has sponsored print advertisements this week on the pages of inside-the-Beltway publications.

Radio-play royalties for performers have been an issue since stations ditched their in-studio performers in favor of recorded music in the 1930s.

Big band leader Paul Whiteman took offense at stations playing recorded music without compensating the artists, and included a directive on his records that they weren’t for play on the radio.

Frank Sinatra also apparently took issue with the lack of radio royalties. In 1988, for example, he wrote a letter to Bruce Springsteen seeking his support in the fight for royalties, according to a letter Simson sent this week to Capitol Hill offices.

So far, broadcasters have been able to block royalties in part by arguing that the royalties amount to a tax. Songwriters get royalties now for over-the-air radio, but the performers don’t.

In total, performance royalties could cost radio stations $7 billion a year, NAB argues.

“The imposition of what broadcasters consider a ‘performance tax’ would be inequitable and unfair to radio broadcasters, who throughout the decades have been substantial contributors to the United States’ complex and carefully balanced music licensing system,” Steven Newberry of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corp. told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November.