The number of people who buy music off the internet from legal stores has nearly doubled since last year, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. As much as 48 percent of the online population used paid services like the iTunes Music Store, MSN Music or Napster, relative to 24 percent last year.

The study however is not all bad news for the army of lawyers that feed of the RIAA's suing frenzy, trying to stop illegal file sharing one lawsuit at a time.

The use of peer-to-peer networks might have gone down, but the researchers suspect that users simply are less likely to admit that they use the file sharing networks.

More importantly, they have found new ways to still their hunger for a multi-gigabyte collection of free music. 19 percent of the internet users simply raid their friends' MP3 players and 28 percent get their music via email.

The RIAA better hire some more lawyers to stop this gross injustice. Or maybe they can focus their efforts on trying to make it more affordable and even easier for consumers to obtain music files in a legal way that they are comfortable with.

24 Mar 2005