^10% for album is a HUGE amount.
The only artist royalty that I have ever heard of is Ami Suzuki. She has a fixed monthly salary (so it doesn' matters how much she sells, short term talking of course.) and at the beginning of her career (when she was no one) she got payed at around 1500 USD
I think. I saw it on an interview some time ago so this is not by heart. Of course right now no one knows how much she earns, but probably all artist start with the same "standard" salary. So I pretty much believe that Ayu has a monthly salary.
Firstly you gotta count her CM appearances and endorsments, and that's where Japanese celebrities get their highest levels of income. You can actually live on commercials, sometimes they even pay artistes 100000 or 200000 USD per TV spot. The least popular celebrities don't get less than 7000 or 10000 USD anyways.
Secondly, magazines. They pay Ayu for appearing on their covers, tho usually she gets payed less than a model, since she's actually promoting a single or an album when she is on ViVi or stuff like that.
And of course, keep in mind that all her expenses while working (and that's a lot of time!! xD) are paid by Avex. The studio, rehearsal places, food, wardrobe in many cases, hair/makeup etc. and travel expenses are all paid by the record company. Tours are also a huge source of profit, and if she owns the copyright of her songs (which she will obviously do on the songs she composed, and anyway owns part of all of them for the lyrics), she also gets money from there.
So I think that if we had to put it on a list, it would look like this:
AYUMI HAMASAKI'S INCOME SOURCES (from greater income to lesser income):
- 1. CM and commercial endorsments.
- 2. Earnings from her work copyright.
- 3. Tours
- 4. Magazine appearances
- 5. Fixed salary
Anyway, she obviously will have to pay lots of taxes anyway.
Making an estimate, (which I believe is real hard to do without actual data, and probably my idea is nowhere close to reality, but anyway, I'm bored so I'll give it a try xD), I imagine that her royalty probably is around 400-500 million USD, not counting her properties like cars or houses.