Do artists benefit more from ad-dense, algorithm gamed, corporate controlled media outlets kicking them a few bucks every month?

No idea, I don’t use those.

The service I use pays (for the 2023-2024 fiscal year) around US$0.01873 per stream in royalties to labels and publishers. Spotify (as of 2025) does $0.003-$0.005 per stream, so it actually improved massively - it’s only 6 times less than Qobuz (used to be 12 times less).

Or is a guerilla campaign of populist free-at-download distribution better for long term concert attendance and merch sales?

Doesn’t work for small acts that don’t do massive, world-wide tours. Nor for fully independent artists who just don’t have the budget to do larger concerts.

The actual difference is that if you are pirating or file-sharing, you’re about 30% likelier to actually buy music

Cool. Apparently I’m not “average person”, because that doesn’t apply to me.