Tony Soprano in Charge of RIAA?

In my continuing rant about the absurdity that is this whole mess with royalties and internet radio, I bring you yet another horrendous act. The company that the RIAA created to collect royalties on behalf of artists, SoundExchange, has the blanket coverage of collecting royalties for all artists, regardless of whether they are members of the RIAA or not. In fact, even if artists don't want SoundExchange to collect money on their behalf, they still do. The biggest kicker here is that if the artist wants to collect these royalties that have been collected for them they have to pay a fee to join SoundExchange. So what you have here is an organization collecting your money, and then charging you to get it from them. Yeah, that sounds about right. This post over at Daily Kos has more.