According to a new survey more and more people are downloading music. The rates increased by 40% in less then a half year. The numbers are coming from a survey taken from US citizens. The total is now about 37 million people (in US).
Rainie said that the survey results are impressive, and that much downloading behavior has been tied to increased news coverage at times when Napster has gone to court. The surveys were mostly conducted prior to early March, when US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel imposed an injunction on Napster, forcing it to block swaps of copyrighted songs on the system. While that ruling hasn't stopped Napster usage, it has decreased the number of songs that are available on the service. |
Ofourse the whole case against napster has an enormous effect on the music downloading. Everyone around the world (who reads the news) knows what napster is.
A simple case:
In April 2000, the non-profit research firm conducted spot checks showing that Napster users stored about 100 songs on their computer hard-drive libraries, on average. When the legal case against Napster heated up in July, that number grew to between 120 and 130. By January, the average number of shared files per user jumped to between 180 and 200. However, after the Patel ruling, Pew spot checks in March and April suggested that the average number of shared files had dropped to between 70 and 80 per user. |
In the following months there is much to come. Napster launches a subscription based service. But nobody knows if in fact people want to pay for music. The time will tell. Also u must not forget that because of napster all the other file sharing programs are popular too.
Read more about the survey here. Also: what is your favourite file sharing prog? Let us know by voting in the poll (mainpage on the left)
Source: Newsbytes
