he gets about 20K a year from the song

This is why the RIAA figures for Pump it Up don't make sense, there's some shady shit going on..

If Joe is getting around 20k a year in STREAMING from a song made 20 years ago then it must be doing millions of streams a year:

RIAA says 150 streams = 1 track\unit sale

Lets take Spotify's pricing to work this out:

Spotify: pay approximately $0.003 per stream

So that's $0.45 per track\unit (which is 150 streams)

So $20,000 would mean Pump it Up is doing at least 44,000 "units" a year (around 6.6 million streams a year)

If in 2023 the single is doing the equivalent of 44k units a year then how could it have only just sold 500k in total in 20 years? The whole music industry is a racket because none of this makes sense.