The RIAA is not a thing because of music artists[0], they were created by music labels to represent their interests.
The biggest mistake people make when talking about anything to do with copyright or the creative industry is to assume that, because publishers of creative works represent or hire authors, that we can just collapse authors and publishers down into a single entity and treat any copyright related argument purely as a struggle between artists getting paid and the public wanting free shit.
Of course, publishers do not have interests aligned with those of authors and artists. This is, at minimum[1], a three-sided war between publishers, authors, and customers. Artists want to be paid but need to go through a publisher to sell[2], while customers want to watch/listen/read but need to buy through a publisher. Publishers have massive incentives to screw over artists by reducing or diluting their take in favor of whatever keeps the machine fed.
While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work, they tend to disagree heavily on who should own those rights and how long they should last. Artists want to sell the thing they made, but publishers want assets: they want a brand that can neatly fit on a marketing schedule or an accounting statement. The former only requires short term copyright owned by individual artists while the latter requires infinity-minus-one-day terms, four companies that own the world's culture, and increasingly expansive interpretations of DMCA 1201 that invent DRM out of things never intended to be DRM.
[0] Let's not call them "content creators"
[1] We can subdivide these groups further still, of course, but three groups is enough to make my point.
[2] As per [1] we are treating distributors and publishers as part of the same group of middlemen. For example, while Amazon Kindle self-publishing does not do some of the same marketing or promotion that a traditional book publisher might, they are still intermediaries between authors and readers.
> While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work
They only need this for the current business model of creating content up front and then collecting payments later. This is not the only way to fund creatives - it's not even the oldest.
Not to mention that with the ability to infinitely recreate all creations without loss of fidelity (as is the case in the digital world) we need to seriously reconsider to what extend whe even need to incentivize creation of even more works. There will always be a base level of artistic output done based on passion and perhaps that is enough.
That content creation needs to be encouraged in the first place still has not been backed up by any kind of studies. But if you were to want to do that, making it a nightmare to build on other people's content is surely not the best way to go about it.
