More Music Fans Stick With Shady P2P Than Legit

More bad mojo for the music industry, courtesy of this Speakerbox study conducted by The Leading Question and MusicAlly. The percentage of music fans regularly buying downloadable tracks has actually gone down from 16 percent in 2006 to 2007 last year, it says. That’s despite the rapid growth of digital sales per se.

They pay for an average 3.32 track downloads per month, but an average 51 percent of listeners’ digital music libraries still comes from their own CD collection.

No question which is the stickier – while the same proportion of music listeners has tried buying online music as has used illegal P2P channels, more people stick with P2P – 22 percent carry on that way versus just 14 percent of legit customers.

Caveat – it’s not the most scientific study, based on 800 face-to-face interviews. MusicAlly urged labels to put their repertoire in to free online services.