According to a survey by the market research firm NPD Group, iTunes has become so popular that they are tying in 2nd place with Limewire of being the most popular site for downloading music. In March, 1.7 million households in the US obtained a song from iTunes, just short of the 2.1 million households who downloaded music from the file sharing network WinMX.
Although
the music industry keeps on complaining about music piracy and the lack of
popularity for legal fee-based sites, it is now at the point where this is no
longer true since iTunes is more popular than the remaining P2P networks. So far, some other legal music services such as Napster and Rhapsody are edging their way into the top most used music download services.
The majority of those who use legal music download sites such as iTunes have an age of over 30, where as the majority of the younger generation still resort to file sharing services.
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The survey by market research firm NPD Group found that approximately 1.7 million U.S. households downloaded a song from iTunes in March. That was good enough to earn the store a second-place ranking with peer-to-peer downloading service LimeWire. The most popular digital music service during the month, however, was P2P site WinMX, which was used by 2.1 million households to download music during the month. "One of the music industry's questions has been, when will paid download stores compete head-to-head with free P2P download services?" Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group's music and movies division, said in a statement. "That question has now been answered. iTunes is more popular than nearly any P2P service." Read the full article here. |
While iTunes may be the 2nd most used service to download music, the quantity of downloads is still likely to be much greater with P2P networks than with iTunes in my opinion. For example, chances are that a lot of consumers having been willing to download a few tracks from iTunes just to try it out, however those who download from P2P services are likely to download a lot more tracks as cost does not become an issue in this case.
Feel free to discuss and find out more about file sharing services and legal alternatives on our Music Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues.
Source: c|net News - Music
