My beef is not with stars, it's with record companies. The proportion of the retail price allocated to the composer and performers is minute.
tigersam258, the fact that the record companies *claim* their prices are high due to piracy, does not make it true.
Back in the 50s 60s and 70s the cost of producing a record was astronomical compared with today. You could knock recording facilities a couple of orders of magnitude better than (say) those used by the Beatles to record Sgt Pepper for a few thousand quid.
And yet , in those days, most record companies ran at a good profit, and still managed to retain on their books many non-profitable musicians, who were nurtured in the names of both investment and art. The job of the A and R man was highly skilled and fundamental to their success.
Today, record companies are run by accountants who think all they need is some magic formula and they can then churn out productions lines of manufactured bands at similar prices (but with massive profit hikes, due to reduced production costs) and they've got it cracked.
You need only look at prats the like of Simon Cowell to see what I mean - he would probably have rejected out of hand just about every major star of the past 50 years because they didn't fit his formula.
When this system fails to bring in the bucks, instead of questioning there products, pricing and delivery systems (what any other industry would do), they start looking for scapegoats and whining about the unfairness of it all.
In the meantime, people like me end up paying through the nose for music and then finding that we can't play it except under such restrictive circumstances as to make it worthless; after replacing my computer media player tells me I need to negotiate individually with each of my music suppliers to re-licence each track that I have paid for.