It feels like in order to have this conversation intelligently, we all need to me on the same page about how royalties work, and the difference in royalty types (at least mechanical vs performance royalties).
From the comments I've read so far, I'd say next to nobody here knows the split difference between record contracts and publishing contracts.
Here's how it was when I studied this 15 years ago.
In a traditional big four record contract, the artist (which for a band like Korn is five people), the record label gets 92% and the artist gets 8% (to split between them), but that's only on domestic (US) sales. On international sales the split is worse at 96%/4%. The artist would typically also pay for any damaged product, which mattered more in the case of shellac records as they are more brittle and broke more often.
For a publishing contract there's more variance in the split but it would typically be more like 60/40.
There's a lot of nuance here, though. Say that the song kicks around and kicks around a bunch of artists refuse it and then eventually an artist makes some changes to it and personalizes it, records it and makes it big. All of a sudden, because of the promotion behind that artist or whatever, the song has a lot of value. And the artists wanted points before they invested the time or whatever in to it.
I'm not saying that its right, only we always want to simplify things that aren't really simple.
