It's not like 10% of sales goes to the song writer, so the artist changing a word means that the artist gets and additional 1% and the song writer only 9%. Surely at the point of producing a contract everyone negotiates the split and signs the contract if they are happy with the deal.
Think of it as separate pies. Album sales will be split into at least 3 pieces. Album sales are the first pie. Firstly the label will have to recoup cost of production, sample clearance, video production etc to recoup. The producers and songwriters will likely get paid here as well, but the artist will get paid only after it recoups. Fuzzy math comes into play here and 10 million selling albums may never recoup...
Next there is the mechanical royalties that come from radio play, streaming, licensing agreements, etc. Those largely go to the owner of the composition(e.g. songwriter) from 25% up to 90ish percent depending on the publishing deal.
The live performance aspect is where the artist can rake it in if they play things smart. The live show largely goes to the artist(*as long as there is not a 360 deal in place*) They can charge what they can get, and sell merch at the show. If they produce their own merch they can probably net a nice profit. If they let a merch company "handle it for them" they will see 10 cents on the dollar or less. Artists can get into trouble if they make their shows too big and would only break even/run at a loss.
360 deals are a particularly insidious anti artist beast. Basically the label throws their might behind the artist and gets a large cut of ALL aspects of the money they make being an artist.(live shows,merch, everything) I suspect many of the big names at least start out in a 360 deal these days, and may have negotiating power once they become Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Ariana Grande.
Songwriters probably have the least negotiating power in this situation. When an artist has 50 songwriting teams throwing tracks their way, a suboptimal deal may have to be accepted just to have a shot at making the album. While I am not saying songwriting is not a talent(it most certainly is), unfortunately more people have said talent than there are A-List stars.
Sorry, but this is wrong. First of all the rates for publishing royalties are standardized and typically wouldn't be renegotiated on a song-by-song or project-by-project basis. So it is very similar to '10% of sales goes to the song writer'.
Equally important is the fact that a share of publishing means a share of all sorts of royalties which aren't negotiated case by case. For example for playing the song on the radio, in restaurants, on TV shows, etc. But even more insidiously, it applies to cover versions. So if Elvis Presley gets a 50% songwriting credit, he will then take 50% of the portion due to the songwriter on any version recorded or played live by anyone (who hasn't added the 'Presley magic'), at any time in the future.
Few people are ever happy with a contract. That's why it's a contract in the first place. If everyone were happy, there'd be no need to make breaking the terms of one actionable.
