If you think you have it bad, imagine making only $0.00043 cents per song you make. Your song would have to be played over 23 times just to make a penny, and over 2,325 times just to make a dollar. Then you could go buy something off the cheap menu at McDonalds.
Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates).
Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods.
But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?
via How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful.
Just use a digital distributor and you’ll get up to 100 % of the revenues. Here you can find a nice graph that compares the distributor recordJet with labels:
http://www.recordjet.com/blog/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/
It does show how much the label makes!
The comparison should be how much the company earn from the music, not the artist If the music companies (who get so much more) are willing to give higher share then the artists will not suffer. The problem is not the piracy but the greed of the musical companies.