Those are good questions but they don't necessarily support the conclusion that streaming is a net financial benefit to the songwriter. I did the back-of-napki

Those are good questions but they don't necessarily support the conclusion that streaming is a net financial benefit to the songwriter. I did the back-of-napkin math once, and came up with this: If a single fan would listen to your mp3 around 1000 times or more, you hope the fan will stream your mp3 rather than buy it, as you'd make more money that way. Otherwise you hope they will buy it. As for the "discovery" benefit of services like Spotify, you have to factor in that Spotify also robs paid downloads. Why would someone download if they can stream from Spotify? So, in order for it to make sense, you have to ask if the benefit in music discovery makes up for the cost of losing album/download sales. That's a much higher bar than to just hand-wave and say "Well I buy some stuff I discover on Spotify!"