James Delahunty
7 Feb 2007 7:31
Despite the lawsuits filed against thousands of U.S. citizens by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the number of people engaged in so called "illegal file sharing" and the number of music transfers has soared in the past year. The record industry wants to stamp out P2P sharing, which it blames almost exclusively for a 23% worldwide decline in sales of music CDs between 2000 and 2006.
To give you an idea of the size of illegal file sharing, Big Champagne estimates that over 1 billion tracks are exchanged monthly. Compare that against Apple's iTunes service, which has sold just over 2 billion songs since it launched back in 2003, which also represents over 70% of the legal music download business.
Russ Crupnick, an analyst at consumer research group NPD, noted a 7% rise in the number of U.S. households engaged in filesharing, and a 24% increase in illegal downloads over the past year. "P2P remains an unacceptable problem," said Mitch Bainwol, RIAA president. "The folks engaged in the practice are doing more of it."
Source:
Reuters