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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Musicians don't usually get a lot of money. The go-to scapegoat remains copyright infringement or piracy as the industry tries to call it. However, that is contradicted by the reality that music industry revenues have been rising for years. The percentage reaching musicians being always small turns out to be due to mostly unnecessary middlemen. TechDirt has done analyses before and now that the data is in for 2017 it shows that only 12% of music revenue collected currently reaches the actual musicians [techdirt.com].

Now we have even more data on this. Citibank recently released a massive and incredibly thorough report on the entire music industry showing how and where the money is made. There's lots of interesting and useful information in the report, but the headline grabbing fact is that musicians end up with just about 12% of global music revenue. As I said, the report is incredibly thorough (and a really useful read if you want to get a sense of just how convoluted and complex the music business really is), but the key is that there was ~$43 billion spent on music in 2017. Approximately $25 billion of that went to everyone (outside of the labels) who helped make the music available: digital streaming services, retail stores, concert venues:

[...] That leaves $18.2 billion in money distributed out to the labels. But of that amount, only about $5 billion actually goes to artists, which means right around 12% goes to artists:

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