It's not just an opinion; I'm a musician myself and had many production contracts in the past; I also studied law and am well familiar with the business and the

It's not just an opinion; I'm a musician myself and had many production contracts in the past; I also studied law and am well familiar with the business and the legal issues. There are indeed some people who were able to make a good living from the money they received from the copyright collecting society, though they are a small minority; all musicians I know who are members of a copyright collecting society get a few hundered Swiss francs a year and don't live from their music. Some years ago I analyzed the yearly business report of SUISA, the Swiss copyright collecting society responsible for musicians, and found that of the 120'000'000 CHF payed by the society only one sixth was given to Swiss composers ("Urheber"), and that the probability of any of those composers would get enough money from SUISA to make a decent living is less than 0.1%; for comparison, the probability of being seriously injured or killed in a traffic accident in Switzerland is > 0.2%; the vast majority (> 97%) gets nothing to less than 1900 CHF. In comparison the administrative cost to run SUISA in the same year was 26 mio CHF (compared to the 20 mio CHF payed to musicians), and the publishers received 54 mio CHF. SUISA payed ~19 mio CHF to their 166 employees; in 2006 357'000 CHF was payed to the director alone.