Getting Online Music

For quite sometime ...one of the music industry's questions has been,
when will paid download stores start competing head-to-head with free
peer-to-peer (P2P) download services? Probably, time has arrived when
an answer can now be given. It has been found that Apple's iTunes is now
more popular than nearly any P2P service.

A 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 2nd place ranking with P2P
downloading service LimeWire.

The most popular digital music service, however, was the P2P site
WinMX, which was used by 2.1 million households to download music
during the month. On NPD's list of the top 10 digital music services,
iTunes was ranked ahead of file-sharing companies such as Kazaa and
iMesh. Other paid online music services such as Napster and
RealNetworks' RealPlayer store also found a place in the list.

According to NPD, about 4% of Internet-enabled households in the
nation used a paid music download store in March. Most of those who
prefer legal music download sites are over 30 years of age. But many
younger consumers still resort to sharing files over peer-to-peer services.