Online peer-to-peer music file swapping dropped the week after the Recording Industry Association of America threatened to hit file swappers with lawsuits, Neilsen/NetRatings reported July 14.
The company said Kazaa and Morpheus had about 15 percent less users during the week ending July 6, according to the Associated Press, which said that translates to about a million less Kazaa users and 41,000 less Morpheus and iMesh users.
"With the negative publicity and threat of steep fines, some surfers appear to be backing off," Neilsen/NetRatings senior Web analyst Greg Bloom told the AP. "However, with millions of loyal users, these applications aren't likely to go off-line in the near future." He also told the AP seasonal factors like the July 4 holiday weekend could have had some effect on the drop, a view said to be shared by Kazaa parent Sharman Networks, though a better view was likely when the full month's data was recorded.
Morpheus parent StreamCast denied any tangible drop in file swap traffic, saying their users were actually staying on the Morpheus program longer per session. "We can pretty much tell usage by our bandwidth," chief executive officer Michael Weiss told the AP, "and our bandwidth has been pretty constant."
