Last week, this handy infographic began to make the rounds. It purported to show how many copies of music in varying formats an artist would need to sell to make the equivalent of the USA's minimum wage. Many artists and labels made a public display of sweaty hand-wringing in response to these giant pink blobs.

It's unclear where this infographic came from (the site listed as a source comes up with a 404 page), but a link at the bottom goes to this spreadsheet where the raw numbers are listed and sourced.

Many people are debunking this graphic (including in the comments of the original gizmodo article) with the claim that with a few exceptions, musicians never made a living wage off recorded music. This is true - if you're not Mick Jagger, your royalties probably didn't buy a goddamned thing, much less provide you with a living wage.

In fact, one of my favorite reads of the last year was this blog entry by Tim Quirk. Who is Tim Quirk? Back in the 1990s, he was in a band you might have caught on MTV's 120 Minutes called Too Much Joy. These days he works at Rhapsody, the online music service. And back in December, he posted about Too Much Joy's latest royalty statement from Warner, which not only has him owing Warner Music $395,000 a couple of decades later, but also states he's made a grand total of $62.47 off digital royalties.

The money shot? Too Much Joy's indie albums, which the band controls, have made about $12,000 off digital royalties. Their major label records? $62.47.

But beyond this, there's one important column missing. Radio. As in, AM, FM, got-a-big-tower-and-call-sign radio. Radio has no column in this table because terrestrial radio is completely exempt from paying performance royalties: the size of the big pink blob representing how many times your music would have to be played on terresterial radio to make minimum wage would be larger than Planet Earth.

Streaming internet radio's royalties might be absurdly low, but for terrestrial radio they don't exist at all. You could take over a radio station and force the staff at gunpoint to play your souled-up disco cover of "Can't Turn Around" for hours on end and you wouldn't see one penny from it. A fraction of a penny isn't much at all; yet even this purely theoretical sum is more than the billion dollar terrestrial radio has paid in performance royalties.

That's what's kind of irritating about it. The point of this graphic is to show that, hey, burning your own CDs will make you more than internet radio, but fails to mention that those gigantic pink circles represent a revenue stream that until the internet came around did not exist at all. People made billions in terrestrial radio, and they did so entirely on the backs of these same artists. Internet radio - as small as the sum may be - is paying something. It represents something new and experimental, but if this graphic is indicative in any way of the industry's sentiments, it's already been written off as worthless.