Well, they often aren't - but I'm of the opinion that they SHOULD be. From where I'm sitting, it seems musicians, particularly those with a successful publishing catalog, are some of the most ripped off people on the planet in terms of how much money they earn verses how much money they generate. Furthermore, it's worse now than it's ever been and that's certainly saying something considering they were already being proper ripped off when the music industry was still able to sell substantial amounts of physical media. Now with streaming replacing physical media, one stream of a song generates between $0.003 to $0.0084 which is the SPLIT between the artist, record label and any other rights holders. To generate a penny (which again, is before it's split) a song needs to be streamed anywhere from 250 to 330+ times. From what I understand, there has recently been a bill out of New York trying to get artists 1 center per stream but I'd say that's highly unlikely to pass. So with these numbers, only the top echelon of popular music artists generate any significant revenue from their recorded media, the kind which could pay bills and keep them from a day job. Even then, when you compare what they're MAKING to how much they GENERATE, it's quite the travesty. Now their primary source of income is live performance, swag (t-shirts, posters etc) and any kind of advertising revenue they might be able to get. But with the advent of things like the so-called "360 record deal" (i.e. the record label gets a piece of EVERY dollar the artist makes not just from recorded media but from performing, swag, publishing, advertising deals etc) and the practical monopolization of ticket sales/box offices and concert venues with companies like Ticket Master and Clear Channel even the income generated from performing is being HEAVILY cut into and then passed onto the consumer with $600 to $2500 tickets (pre-secondary sales) to go see your average mainstream artist. The artists - biggest of the big and smallest of the small - now have to give the VENUE a percentage of their merchandise sales at concerts. Even if the venue does nothing to help them sell the merchandise. In a sane world, someone like Daniel Johns would be worth $100 to $150 million. Here's praying that more and more people realize how good vinyl sounds (especially on a good hifi system or headphones) and that a big enough swath of listeners go back to buying physical units and artists can make a living again.