Napster has seen traffic surge even as it scrambles to block trade in copyright material, according to a study released in the US.
The number of downloads on the Napster system spiked to 593 million songs in the last week of March, up more than 25 percent from the previous week, according to Webnoize, a company that follows online entertainment.
The evidence that consumers are downloading more songs through the restricted service comes amid a continued skirmishing between Napster and the record industry over whether the service has done enough to comply with the landmark court order that requires it to block trades of copyrighted material.
"Users are taking the file-blocking filter in their stride," Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey said in a statement. "Millions of users continue to use Napster to access huge amounts of free music."
The Recording Industry Association of America believes Napster is not complying with the March 5 injunction against it, but Napster says it had blocked more than 275,000 songs from being downloaded by the end of the month.
The file-swapping service said major labels had not provided it with any variants of any song names, which would allow it to set up more efficient filters to block those copyright-protected tracks. Napster said that 30 percent of its staff was working on aspects of complying with the court order against it in March.
On a monthly basis, Napster site traffic peaked in January when nearly 3 billion songs were downloaded, according to Webnoize data.
That tally slipped to 2.79 billion in February and 2.49 billion in March.
