there's a LOT LOT LOT more money to go around in the tv/movie industry.
Not really, at least not that many "LOT"s. Last year's total revenue for the US film industry was $31B, and it was $15B for the US music industry. So only 2x as much money to go around.
The difference is that in the film industry, it can still be divided into chunks that are meaningful, because it doesn't have the supply glut that music does.
In 2011, 2910 films were released in the US. In contrast, 76,875 albums were released. That's 26 times more releases fighting for half the money, so from that perspective, you're right, each production can theoretically get a share 50 times larger in the film world than in the music world.
In another view, of those 76,875 albums released in 2011, 2% (1500) of them accounted for 88.5% of the sales. The least-popular 98% of albums sold an average of 172 copies each.
Via my Spotify subscription, I'm currently sending about $13 into the pockets of artists per year. If I bought 45 CDs per year (which seems about "normal" for here based on the poll results), I'd be sending about the same amount into their pockets. So Spotify vs. CD is clearly not the problem.
And say I doubled the amount that artists get from each CD sale, or even tripled it. When you have a 98% chance of selling only 172 copies of your CD, even if you make $10 in profit per CD, that's not going to do a damn thing to pay your rent or put food on the table.
The number of competing artists out there is clearly plays a much bigger role in the failure of artists than the method we each use to compensate them.