itunes Royalties

It seems the artist sees only 9 cents per track downloaded. There was talk in the news recently of Apple threatening to shut down the itunes store if they were forced by a regulatory body to increase this to 15 cents, but this was averted (and the rate frozen for the next 5 years). Even though this probably works out as a better deal for the artist than what they would make per CD from a major label, how can Apple justify making such a huge profit with no physical product, and hence minimal distribution costs? Apparently there have been over 5 billion songs downloaded in the last 5 years through their store, so if you add it up that's a hell of a lot of revenue. I'm not surprised so many people are involved in illegal downloading when over 90% of what they would be paying is going Apple's way.....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7649770.stm