Check this out: people are downloading a lot more music. They're downloading a lot more music and paying for it, and downloading a lot more music and not paying for it.
My guess is they drive one another: the more popular digital music becomes, the more of both kinds of downloading we'll see. That means that if the music industry manages to pull off its unlikely stunt of killing P2P services, it will let the air out of the for-pay services too.
After all, if the only way to load 10,000 tracks on an iPod was to buy them at $0.99 each from the iTunes Music Store, would there be much market for iPods? And without the market for iPods, what happens to the Music Store?
Research by NPD Group found that consumers purchased 25.9 million songs in March 2005. This is an increase of 52 per cent on the buying habits of a year ago, writes Forbes.
However, more than 242 million songs were downloaded illegally in March. This is a quarter more than this time last year.