At least here, a good chunk of that money does indeed fund other cultural endeavors.
Cultural endeavors is a very polite way to put it. A large chunk of it goes to only a handful of big performers in the music industry, the small ones who would actually need money get very little.
Actually GEMA takes a percentage from the big pop musicians to help fund the contemporary/avantgarde composers who would otherwise earn a lot less. There are plenty of things to complain about with GEMA but I think for the most part they do a lot to support smaller, more obscure genres. (I ran a publishing company for contemporary music in Germany for ten years, so I had a lot to do with GEMA)
It depended on many factors like the size of the venue, length and instrumentation of the piece, also the genre. I can’t give you an amount in € off the top of my head how much I earned lol.
