Napster's CEO says reports of the company's demise are exaggerated, with an average one million people using the file-swapping service at any given time.
"The most striking fact in the latest Webnoize study is the high number of music consumers who remain loyal to file sharing," said Napster CEO Hank Barry.
Webnoize this week reported the number of songs swapped on Napster fell by more than a third, down 36 percent, in April from March as its court-ordered filters blocked more pirated files.
Nevertheless, over a billion files were still traded in April and Napster still draws millions of people each day.
The number of files traded on the Napster service has steadily declined, from a peak of 2.79 billion in February to 2.49 billion in March and 1.59 billion in April, Webnoize said.
"Even though over 80 percent of Napster users' files are being blocked at the request of copyright holders, close to 8 million people are using Napster each day with an average of over 1 million using the service at any given time," Barry said.
The world's biggest record labels - including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and BMG first sued Napster in December 1999, claiming it was a haven for copyright piracy that would cost them billions of dollars in lost music sales.
On March 5, a federal court ruled that Napster must block the trading of copyrighted files on its system.
Representatives from the recording industry were not overly impressed with the latest Webnoize findings.
"I don't view it as a significant change. If those numbers are representative of the amount of downloads, it shows there is still a substantial amount of piracy occurring on Napster," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president for business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
