Image: Brendan Smialowski

Following his famed appearance at last week’s met gala beside Grimes, PayPal, Tesla, Space X and The Boring Company founder Elon Musk has spoken up about the ethics behind the booming music streaming market.

After revealing his relationship to the popular synth pop extraordinaire, it’s no surprise that the tech giant has decided to speak out on the issue, after teasing a music streaming service exclusive to Tesla. However, this issue is nothing new, with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke speaking out on the issue in 2013, along with an endless list of major artists including, Taylor Swift, Prince and Kanye West ordering their music to be removed from streaming sites.

The issue was brought up during a dialogue between him and a myriad of twitter users, in which one user asked “Would it benefit Grimes more if we were to buy her song/albums on iTunes? Rather than, sharing on Spotify or YouTube” to which Elon Musk replied with a pair of charts showing how much artists are paid for revenue, noting “crazy low payout” to artists, with YouTube and Pandora among the lowest.

This chart shows how crazy low payout is to labels & the artists only a small fraction of these numbers pic.twitter.com/2us0rzTMqk

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2018

With the topic of online music streaming proving to be a very David-and-Goliath dialogue between individual creatives and multinational corporations, it’s commendable for a tech giant such as Musk himself to speak out against the corrupt distribution of revenue in the music industry.