NET Compare yourself to actors and baseball players. Like the music business, the film and the sports industries generate billions of dollars in income each year, but those industries offer far better benefits to the men and women who create their wealth. The Screen Actors Guild offers a fantastic health care plan to its members. That health plan is paid for by the contracts that SAG has negotiated with film studios. The baseball player's union has negotiated a pension plan that ensures that NO major league player ever finds himself without an income.
Record companies keep almost all the profits.
Recording artists get paid a tiny fraction of the money earned by their music. That allows record executives to be incredibly sloppy in running their companies and still create enormous amounts for cash for the corporations that own them. The royalty rates granted in every recording contract are very low to start with and then companies charge back every conceivable cost to an artist's royalty account. Artists pay for recording costs, video production costs, tour support, radio promotion, sales and marketing costs, packaging costs and any other cost the record company can subtract from their royalties. Recording contracts are unfair and a single artist negotiating an individual deal doesn't have the leverage to change the system.