Earlier this month Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor took to social media to discuss his current issues with the streaming music industry and the low payouts most artists receive from the format.

A recent report on the matter saw streaming services such as Spotify pay .00437 per stream, with 336,842 streams required per month to meet the US minimum monthly wage of $1,472. The report further stated that services such as Apple Music and Google Play Music pay out better at .00735 and .00676 respectively.

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Legislation was introduced by U.S. Copyright Royalty Board earlier this year which saw the music streaming royalty rates for songwriters and music publishers raised by 44% per cent to narrow the difference between them and record labels. While many musicians saw this as a step in the right direction, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and Google have since appealed the motion, effectively tying it up in the courts for the time being.

Speaking recently with Rock Feed (see below), Taylor opened up further on his thoughts on the matter. During the conversation he also mentioned Tool‘s entrance into the world of digital media earlier this month. As Tool drummer Danny Carey has since revealed, a part of their reluctance to embrace the format came about from having to renegotiate the entire digital domain aspect of their contracts.

Speaking on the matter, Taylor was asked what musicians can do to get better royalty rates from streaming services, he replied:

“I’ll tell you what they can do; they can start by all of them banding together and pushing the streaming services to stop appealing the legislation that’s already been put in place to pay us better. There’s a reason that Tool waited as long as they did to put their stuff up on streaming services, ’cause they knew they weren’t gonna be compensated for something that they worked their asses off for. To me, it smells of two things, with Tool: a) it’s perfect timing, because they have a new album coming out; and b) they probably worked out a deal with their label to make sure that they got a piece of the money that the label’s automatically going to get because of the money that’s being generated from streaming.”

He added:

“That’s what people don’t understand. The difference between streaming and radio is you make money off radio because of the publishing that’s involved. With streaming, there really is no publishing that is promised. That money goes directly to — and technically it’s mechanicals — goes directly to the label. So the label is making huge amounts of money. And they are not contractually bound to pay us for that, because of what they call ‘new technology.’ And unless you have been able to renegotiate your contracts in a way that makes it viable for you — which we haven’t; which a lot of people haven’t, because you can’t keep up with the technology. Unless you are able to adapt with that — and legally, a lot of labels won’t let you do that — you get screwed. So from a publishing standpoint, the only way for us to make money, like that, off of the streaming is for that legislation to actually be signed into law. Which the fact that they are appealing it — most of them are, anyway — is just a smack in the face.”

While some may take his viewpoint to mean he’s against streaming, Taylor later clarified:

“We don’t have a problem with streaming. We don’t have a problem with people listening to our music. What we have a problem with is these streaming services basically treating it like we owe them, which is not the way it should be.”

[via Blabbermouth]