James Delahunty
13 Mar 2007 20:07
The NPD Group has published a study on digital music consumption on the Internet, though legal and illegal means, and has come to some interesting conclusions. The study showed that legal, paid music downloads are gaining on P2P downloads at a high rate. "Legal a la carte downloads were the fastest growing digital music category in 2006, and it is likely that the annual number of legal users will surpass P2P users in 2007," said Russ Crupnick, vice president and entertainment industry analyst for The NPD Group.
He continued: "Unfortunately for the music labels, the volume of music files purchased legally is swamped by the sheer volume of files being traded illegally, whether on P2P or burned CDs sourced from borrowed files." While Apple's iTunes store, by far the dominant store in the online music download market, has sold over 2 billion music downloads since it launched, that figure is accomplished by illegal downloading in a matter of months.
The NPD Group found that the number of P2P users did increase in 2006 from 2005, but at a slower rate than previous years. However, the number of file transfers between those users increased a whopping 47%. There were 47 million U.S. households that have at least one member that downloaded, ripped, burned, played, or uploaded digital music by the end of 2006.
About 15 million of these downloaded at least one music file using P2P in 2006, an 8% increase on the previous year. While the growth rate in terms of users is slowing, NPD did reveal that the number of downloads per user is still actively rising.
Source:
Slyck