CDs all the way for me. Here's how they compare for my band:

When we sell a CD for £12.00 at a gig we get to keep £12.00

Selling a physical CD via Bandcamp for £12.00 we have to deduct their 10% fee, Paypal charges and P&P, so we get to keep around £8.00. That's still a good deal for us.

Spotify payouts vary according to the length of the track, but averages around $0.00621563 each, which is £0.0044646. That doesn't take account of Paypal charges to send it to us. So we need more than 2,688 Spotify streams to equal one CD at full price. That may not be a lot for a mainstream artist, but for a semi-pro ceilidh band it takes a while.

Looking at a breakdown of our sales by value, 66% are direct sales of CDs, mostly at gigs. 28% are online sales of physical CDs, mostly through Bandcamp. Only 6% comes from digital sales, and that includes downloaded albums at £10.00 each as well as streaming.

So Spotify is a lousy deal financially. The reason to be on it is to get our music out there. If somebody hears of us they can quickly check out our music. Hopefully one or two of these might buy an album or go to a gig, or better still offer us one. It helps give some credibility. It's also quite cool to see that people in distant lands have listened to us. But as a means of generating actual cash it's pretty rubbish, at least for bands like us.