Napster sees big drop in downloaded songs
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — Napster is by no means dead, but the latest usage numbers show the revolutionary song-swapping service is a vastly reduced version of its former bad-boy self.
An analyst for Webnoize, a research firm that has tracked Napster usage, said yesterday that the average number of songs offered for trading by each user has dropped by more than 80 percent in the past month.
Napster CEO Hank Barry said the Webnoize numbers illustrate users' loyalty despite its court-ordered blocking of copyright music, and don't reflect a dying company.
"The most striking fact in the latest Webnoize study is the high number of music consumers who remain loyal to file sharing," Barry said yesterday. "Close to 8 million people are using Napster each day with an average of over 1 million using the service at any given time."
A million users would be a success for many Internet companies, but it represents a sharp decline in activity for Napster, which has hobbled itself in response to the music industry's copyright suit.
Napster, a dorm room experiment that revolutionized the music business, is now struggling to retain its vast user base as it employs tough new screening technology to inhibit the trading of copyright songs.
Napster users downloaded nearly 1.6 billion songs in April, down sharply from February's 2.8 billion, when music fans downloaded with a vengeance, anticipating that Napster would be shut down.
In March, users shared 220 song files on average. By April, they shared 37 on average, a decline of more than 80 percent, according to Matt Bailey, a Webnoize analyst.
And since last week, many more songs have been blocked. Napster now screens for a wide range of variations in artist and song names that had allowed copyright music to reappear in its index.
"That, in turn, has unfortunately caused substantial additional 'overblocking,' the unintentional removal of otherwise authorized works, for which we apologize to our users and artists," Napster told its fans.
The major labels appreciate the effort Napster has put into the latest screening technology, but it simply doesn't go far enough, said Matt Oppenheim, the recording industry trade group's senior vice president for business and legal affairs.
"I don't view that as a significant change. If those numbers are representative of the amount of downloads, it said there is still a substantial amount of piracy going on Napster," said Oppenheim of the drop to 1.59 billion songs.
"These numbers don't in and of themselves represent any indication that Napster's filtering is adequate," he added. "You could have a 50 percent decline of files shared. If it's not a 50 percent decline of the titles of songs available it doesn't really matter."
There were indeed fewer files being traded in April, and fewer people doing it.
In February, the zenith of Napster use in the short life-span of the company, there were nearly 1.6 million people logged on to Napster at any given time. In April, there were just more than 1 million users logged on, and they were trading a smaller selection of music, Bailey said.
