Petteri Pyyny
7 Jun 2005 13:45
Recent study in the United States by NPD Group found that more Americans used iTunes than most of the P2P tools to download music.
According to study, approximately 1.7 million American households used iTunes to download at least one song during March this year. In comparison, the second most popular P2P application for music downloads was LimeWire, used by 1.7 million American households. Only the most popular P2P tool in States during that period, WinMX, was used by more households to download music -- used by 2.1 million households. Other major legal music stores also made their way to the first-ever "combined P2P and legal music store" charts -- Napster was the 7th and Real's music store was 9th.
Obviously the chart is slightly misleading as it doesn't include data of how many tracks were downloaded by each household during the tracking period -- a ranking in which P2P tools would most likely win legal music stores hands down. But it is an interesting trend and shows that market is ready to use a legal service if it doesn't have too many restrictions, is easy to use and has large enough selection available. Obviously there are consumers who will consider using legal music stores only when the tracks come without DRM restrictions and cost far less than the current $0.99 per track.
Source: NPD press release