The music industry made $43 billion in 2017, according to a new report from Citigroup. It's the industry's biggest haul since 2006 when people were still buying lots of CDs.
Recording artists only got 12 percent of that revenue, or $5.1 billion. Most of that came from touring.
That sounds bad, but the artist percentage has been coming up over the years: it was 7 percent in 2000.
Still, that's an awful lot of money going to non-creatives, and it makes the music industry unique.
"Currently artists are at the end of the line," analyst Bjorn Niclas said in the report. "They get the smallest piece of the pie even though they are the ones creating the content. In any other industry you typically see much better returns and margins."
Meek Mill and Lupe Fiasco picked up on that theme, with Lupe signaling out Spotify.