The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently released its first ever year-end music totals, with sales of 139,400 digital singles and about 4.5 million digital albums in 2004. That amounts to about $184 million in revenue, which represents only about 1.6 percent of the US music industry's total revenue. The statistics indicate that people are taking advantage of legal music-downloading alternatives. Analysts estimate that consumers still download as many as 1 billion illegal songs a month on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that the number of users on P2P networks who download music or video is down from 58 percent in February 2004 to 21 percent in recent months. Music swappers are also increasingly downloading songs from other people's MP3 players, as well as getting files via Instant Messaging (IM) applications and blogs
