Cap'n,
".....the traditional singer is paid a lump sum in advance for his songs."
This presumes that the commercially use of the songs is the object of the exercise in the first place - I know very few instances where this has been the case.
Primarily the collectors I have know, (us included) have recorded for archival and research purposes; any albums we have put out have been a side-product.
The sale of albums of field recordings is pitifully small and more often than not does not even cover the production costs.
The one instance where we issued an album of a single singer (Tom Lenihan), a fee was agreed between the singer and the company (Topic); we had nothing to do with it other than to act as go-betweens; our 'payment' was 6 copies of the LP.
Other companies have not been so generous; for more recent projects we were given 10 copies which we had to distribute between the singers and their families. Because they were ensembles of numerous singers the initial 'fee' was so pitifully small that if we had shared it out the sum would have been insulting so, with the agreement of all the singers we donated all royalties to the Irish Traditional Music Archive - poured it back into the music. That has always been our practice with everything we do connected with collecting.
I have no idea what the average financial expectancy is for a revival singer, but it doesn't work for source singers.
In the end it becomes a choice between issuing an album and making up the financial shortfall yourself or leaving the material on an archive shelf for posterity; we chose the latter as long as we could get the full agreement of the singers . In 30 years we never encountered a financial problem with the singers we have known - they simply did not connect the act of singing with making money. One thing we always guaranteed was that if there was any payment arising from the recordings it was automatically theirs.
There have been perks we have been able to offer; fees for club appearences (severely limited by the small number of clubs prepared to book relatively unknown field singers - "We don't do anything like that; we're a fok club!!") and visits to local schools and libraries.
We were once caught out by, surprisingly enough, The National Folk Festival at Sutton Bonnington when we took a Traveller storyteller singer only to find that they only paid expenses. As that included (only) one of us and the singer we managed to combine our and his expenses and chip in something to cover his fee for the week-end.
He was surprised and delighted to receive anything - for us it was a a salutory lesson in how the traditional/revival class system operated, even among those with the best of intentions.
Better get down off my hobby-horse before I end up with writers cramp.
Jim Carroll