Plus smaller labels may not have contracts as rapacious as big ones. Remember, almost no metal bands are on RIAA labels.
Good to know, reading this was a bit of a shock at first. But yeah, it kind of makes sense that it's almost only the major labels doing this.
It would be cool to know in average how much money metal bands make off each 1000$ of music sold though (if they have enough fans to sell music for 1000$ that is

).