Rather than guess what the number of plays is, I think what's more valuable is to see what the break even point is.
Assuming 12 songs on a CD, and that each CD costs $2 to print, distribute, and account for merchant margins, that gives us effectively $0.66666 per song. At the rate of $0.00786 per play on spotify, you'd have to play each song on your physical CD 84 times (or 1018 plays across varied tracks) before it produced less revenue for the artist than a play on spotify.
I'm guestimating here, but I'd say that in general artists/record companies benefit more from CD sales based on those numbers.
Assuming 12 songs on a CD, and that each CD costs $2 to print, distribute, and account for merchant margins, that gives us effectively $0.66666 per song. At the rate of $0.00786 per play on spotify, you'd have to play each song on your physical CD 84 times (or 1018 plays across varied tracks) before it produced less revenue for the artist than a play on spotify.
I'm guestimating here, but I'd say that in general artists/record companies benefit more from CD sales based on those numbers.