LimeWire shutdown precipitates filesharing decline?

P2P firm LimeWire shut down in October last year, after losing its court battle against music industry rightsholders. NPD Group has now put out some numbers on the impact this shutdown has had on filesharing in the US. NPD describes a ‘precipitous’ decline, yet its headline stats focus on 16% of US internet users using P2P in Q4 2007, versus 9% in Q4 2010 after LimeWire closed.

Billboard has a more telling stat – the percentage was 12% in Q3 2010, so the drop was significant. NPD says that in Q4 last year, there were 16 million P2P users downloading music, down from 28 million in Q4 2007. “Limewire was so popular for music file trading, and for so long, that its closure has had a powerful and immediate effect on the number of people downloading music files from peer-to-peer services and curtailed the amount being swapped,” says NPD’s Russ Crupnick. What the stats don’t show is how many of those people have switched to legal services, rather than getting their music from cyberlockers or unlicensed streaming sites.

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Tags: billboard, limewire, NPD Group, P2P

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 10:19 am and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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