Right, these lawyers are parasites sucking blood not just from society in general, but also blood from most of the artists ostensibly represented by the RIAA. If any artists come out ahead from anything the RIAA's lawyers do, it's only the elite already-wealthy ones.

For German GEMA (which is working a bit different from RIAA, so can't be fully conapred) there are some numbers on Wikipedia, till 2012: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musika...

They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the creator is theoretically stronger positioned than in US copyright.

(Now this isn't 100% fair as analysis, as some of the payments to labels go to artits, as well and labels also do some marketing etc benefiting the artist ... and then there is this weird distribution mechanism where a successful artist gets over proportionally more ... but in the end: "small" artists only get a very tiny part of the cake)

It's not really a secret. The music industry has always been about concerts: radio play (or streaming, which uses the same revenue model) doesn't pay anything and artists get pennies on the dollar for record sales. The RIAA represents record labels more than artists.