With the first big batch of music now blocked from Napster's file-swapping network, the average number of songs available on the service has dropped precipitously, according to at least one research company.
After the latest update of its filters Wednesday night, the average number of MP3 files publicly shared by music-swappers on the service dropped from 172 to just 71, a drop of close to 60 percent, according to analysts for Webnoize.
Wednesday was the deadline for Napster to block a list of 135,000 songs identified by the record industry late last week.
The service is far from useless. Even many of the blocked songs, ranging from Madonna to Elvis, are still available online in some form. But many of the most popular songs and artists on the service have disappeared or are much harder to find, indicating that Napster's attempts to screen copyright works are in line with a recent court order.
Although the amount of people on the system has remained fairly consistent, the number of files downloaded has been cut roughly in half, Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey said.
Webnoize has reported that about 2.7 billion files were traded through Napster in February, shortly before the service voluntarily took the first steps to remove titles.
"The first phase of the filters did have some impact," Bailey said. "But certainly not as much impact as the new filters (added) last night."
Complaints
Many people writing on Napster's online bulletin boards appeared resigned to the filters, but the new wave of screens drew some bitter complaints.
"Napster is getting harder and harder to use," wrote "Chris275" on Wednesday night. "Is it going to stay up?...I'm sharing only 1700 out of 2800 files. Napster is going to lose a lot of people to this."
The last several months of publicity have drawn people increasingly to Napster alternatives such as Gnutella, iMesh and open-source versions of Napster itself.
According to Clip2 Chief Executive Kelly Truelove, whose company monitors traffic on the Gnutella file-swapping network, the average daily number of users there has jumped more than tenfold since December.
Before the appeals court ruling that sealed Napster's short-term fate, only about 10,000 to 20,000 people a day used Gnutella software, compared with about 250,000 a day now, he said.
Nevertheless, the progressive implementation of filters on Napster has had a smaller effect. "We haven't seen any drastic changes in the last week," Truelove said.
Other file-swapping programs, such as iMesh, remain among the most popular software on Download.com, a site owned by ZDNet News parent CNET Networks. More than 400,000 copies of iMesh were downloaded in the last week, according to that site.
