Peter Frampton: 55 million streams and I got paid $1700
So if streaming is such sheet stop doing it. If the record company is taking too much of your money, quit using them. If people are ripping your content, punish them brutally. It sucks to have work this way but it's business and you have to treat it like business. If all creators of content, regardless of content took this approach then everything would change for them and the industry as a whole. But it wont.
With any form of digital art, its a catch 22. On the one hand, you want people to consume your product , and you want it to be easily available for them to do so.
On the other hand, you want people to compensate you for the work you did.
Its a difficult situation.
What's happening in your situation, is people taking your work, then rebranding/aggregating it along with others, which is then (maybe) viewed by thousands. And your downstream users are demanding a fixed fee, not per view (I'm assuming)
With respect to streaming music. I think the network egress fees are not the real issue. Looking at it from the consumer end. Let's say a person listens on average about 100 songs per day (this is several hours), using up 500 MB of bandwith. Let's ignore caching for the moment (I'm not sure the extent to which these services cache). Over a month that would only amount to network usage of cost of about $1.50. The services I think are charging ~ $10/month.
But per stream, that is about 0.3 cents (bulk revenue) of which it was saying the "rights" holder got 0.173 cents, or about 57%. That is pretty much pure profit for the rights holder, who doesn't have to worry about those pesky maintenance and marketing fees.
This is actually about in line with alot of other employees in high end business. E.g. professional sports teams, players get maybe 50-55% of league wide revenues (gross, before costs)
So the conflict might be more with the record labels, as it has always been. This is why alot of the smarter artists, started their own label, or demanded being essentially business partners with their label.