What the heck…? The NPD Group has released a startling and somewhat inexplicable press release concerning a measurement study just completed. The headline is an eye-grabber: "iTunes More Popular Than Most Peer-To-Peer File Sharing Services." iTunes (by which I assume NPD means iTMS) is shows to be tied with LimeWire for second place in popularity during March of this year, based on "the number of households acquiring a digital song." From eye-grabbing to head-scratching, this blithe pronouncement begs several question, which I have addressed to the study's author. (Will report back any interesting response.) Does one download count as one use? Or is it unique visitors? Why isn't Bit Torrent represented in the results? But of course these glaring questions are not stopping the press release from being picked up and run as objective news by the wire services.
Here are a few headlines circulating around this study from news sources that apparently will publish any damn thing:
Study: iTunes More Popular
Than P2P
Apple iTunes Outpaces P2P Services
Apple iTunes overtakes many P2P websites
iTunes Coming Out Strong Against P2P Music Downloads
The most mysterious and, honestly, bogus presumption here is that iTMS competes with individual file-sharing programs. If you are going to position iTMS use against file-sharing, you must take file-sharing as a whole. Following that logic, it makes sense to consider authorized services as a whole. Then you get a salient conception of how authorized downloading is faring against unauthorized downloading, and it isn't pretty. Regardless how my specific methodology questions are answered, the conclusion—that authorized music service is drawing even with unauthorized downloading—is utterly wrong and gruesomely misleading. My next question might be: Who sponsored the study?
1. Welcome to the mainstream press and all its wonder. I actually don't doubt the veracity of the numbers themselves, but I think it's obvious how ridiculously misinterpreted they are.
First of all, iTunes isn't up as much as P2P is down. With the RIAA suing everyone in sight, people are running scared. But that doesn't mean all those people are defecting to iTunes because they prefer the system.
Only those who are really interested in P2P as a technology or social phenomenon are still doing it, and those folks are going to very quickly flock to the next big thing and abandon the old one. Everybody's using BitTorrent these days, and no one's using Kazaa any more (notice how BitTorrent isn't represented in the study, probably because it is not a full-search p2p application).
So somebody spun a headline. It's not the first time: http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000313042212/
Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Sage