i've long felt that, if/when i start making games, if i ever collaborate with others, i would want to just split the profits evenly between everyone who worked on a game. so like each programmer would get a fraction and each artist would get a fraction, the composer would get a fraction, etc.
but some types of games benefit from using licensed music. the tony hawk games were great for introducing me to bands i still love today, for instance, and open-world car games like saints row 2 or GTA etc benefit from an in-game radio with a few stations that have different vibes.
and so here is what i am contemplating: designating two fractions of profit to then be further split evenly among all artists whose music is licensed in-game. i have no idea if this would actually be a good deal for artists, though, so i wanted to float it out there since cohost has a lot of musicians on it.
so let's say a game makes uhhh $30,000 in a year, and had 3 programmers and 2 artists, and then music licensed from 10 bands/artists. each band would get about $857. is that a decent amount?
please ignore the "something like saints row 2 is unrealistic at an indie scale" as this is strictly hypothetical.