RIAA Hates Competition

So, I've been following the travails of a smallish Internet radio station I happen to love: SomaFM. They have been battling with the RIAA, the CRB, and SoundExchange to negotiate the new fees associated with broadcasting music over the internet. They were to have gone into effect this time last year, which would have bankrupted most of the stations I like, and would have made innovation difficult for larger concerns (like NPR, for example). Here's a quote from Rusty Hodge from SomaFM:

The big RIAA labels are threatened by independent internet broadcasters and want to make sure that we're constrained to a niche market.

We're very disappointed with this so-called "offer".

The RIAA is still out to kill off independent webcasters like SomaFM.

My question is this - why do we, the music industry, or the artists need three separate bodies to protect their interests? The RIAA can only be interested in the survival of the music companies, so that leaves the artists and the customers in second and third place. We've seen them go after the customers in file sharing cases, too, so I think I know where we stand.

The CRB is supposedly in charge of maintaining fair and reasonable royalties for artists. Who funds the CRB? How many people are on that board?

I won't even pretend to know who SoundExchange is, but they have lobbying power and are the force behind this changing litigation, as far as I can tell. Who do they represent?

Who represents me in this equation?

At some point, congress has to realize that nobody wants to eschew royalties paid to artists. The problem is that there are too many hands in the till between the customer and the artist. SomaFM (and other smallish Web broadcasters) provide a simpler system which offers far more benefit to the artists. They are willing to pay fair royalties and most of them link to a resource where you can buy stuff from the artist. They circumvent these boards and associations, and they're becoming more and more popular. It's pretty obvious why the major labels don't like it.