If you want me to break down the payment, you have two streams of thought. One would be an artist signs to a major label. Without getting into the finances of how that deal is initially instigated, how the payment breaks down is rather simple.
Once the artist recoups their money, perhaps their deal is at 25% royalty rates. So, perhaps you look at a dollar download on iTunes for the best example, because if we try to break down the micropennies on the streaming side it would be almost next to impossible to do. But if you're looking at, say, just simply a dollar for a single download on iTunes, under a traditional deal, if the artist has recouped their expenditures on the recording, they would get, say, 25¢ of that dollar.
What happens is iTunes sells it for a dollar. Seventy-two cents goes back to the label, whether it's a major or an independent. From that, 72¢ is broken out 25:75—75% to the label and 25% to the artist.
So you can see, even on an album, if an artist was to get, say, two dollars, at best, and that's a really extremely high royalty rate, you would have to sell literally hundreds of thousands of records to make a living off just solely your album sales. And it's virtually impossible to sell hundreds of thousands of records.