The study in part attributes this decrease to consumers’ fears that internet service providers will cut off their web access if they are found to be illegally downloading or sharing songs. Another reason for the growing popularity of legal downloads must surely be the number of decent online services that are available. Until fairly recently, if you wanted to download music from the internet, the only option was Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

advertisement That was great if you owned an iPod, but not much help if you used another music player most songs sold through the iTunes Music Store are encrypted with digital rights-management software (DRM) that prevents piracy and illegal copying, but also restricts the sort of devices tracks can be stored and played on.

Consumers were reluctant to pay for legal download services when the ways in which they could use the music were so heavily restricted, and varied so widely from service to service. Added to this, music available on peer-to-peer filesharing sites was DRM-free, and playable on any MP3 player, so it’s not hard to see why so many people turned to illegal downloading.

Times are changing, however, as record labels acknowledge that providing consumers with the music they want, in the format they want it, is a much better way of encouraging people to pay for songs. A number of online music stores have launched in recent months that offer legal downloads from all the “big four” record labels, as well as hundreds of independents, in a universal, DRM-free MP3 format that can be used on any device.