Napster Users Flock to Gnutella Network

Traffic to file sharing network Gnutella, has grown by more than 60 percent in the last six weeks, according to peer-to-peer tracking site, Clip2. The gain was from 24,000 on April 2 to 37,500 on May 14, with the highest usage over the weekend.

Napster's song-blocks, which the company introduced in March to satisfy a court order, have led to an 80 percent drop in the number of files available, according to the company's own figures. Independent research firm Webnoize, reported that the number of files swapped on the service dropped by 36 percent in April.

Napster still records traffic of over a million simultaneous users, with 8 million users logging on each day. Most major label songs were difficult to find on the site by the end of April, although these songs still can be found through the use of misspellings and code names. Last week, Napster released a new version of its song-blocking software that reads the acoustic properties of individual music files and blocks file transfer based on that information.

Phil Leigh, vice president of financial analysis firm Raymond James & Associates, said that Gnutella's traffic growth will convince record labels to provide subscription services. "Most online consumers will avoid bootleg activity if the industry provides a legitimate alternative," James said. Unlike Napster, Gnutella is a pure P2P network with no central organization for the record labels to sue.