Here's some very interesting news that was posted over at P2Pnet. They are reporting some statistics provided by a group called Big Champagne, which is a website that is just tickled pink about P2P and filesharing in general. They are also a market research source, that gives us information on music trends online and what's popular.

They seem to wish to become a latter day Neilson rating type service. here's a bit of what they have to say: "Since the rise and fall of Napster, file sharing has moved into the mainstream. At present, tens of millions of consumers access one or more of these networks each month. P2P is an amazingly successful "idea virus," a concept but also an architecture for distributed computing. P2P networks are now incorporated in industry, banking, and entertainment. BigChampagne's commitment is to develop measurement technologies and marketing strategies for these new networks, recognizing the extraordinary opportunity that P2P architecture offers all content creators in improving distribution, customer profiling and true permission-based marketing." 

Ok, I can buy that, now here are some of their recent findings. Behold, the average number of p2p users who were simultaneously online on all p2p networks at any given moment in the US between August, 2003, and October 15, 2004.

Like P2Pnet says in the above quote, draw your own conclusions. I'm not any good with statistics, but if I read those up there right and if they are accurate, P2P is growing not declining and the holy jihad the RIAA has unleashed on the public is grossly ineffective. You can see it took a little dip there for awhile, but then it got up, dusted itself off and started getting bigger again! Of course, who knows where it would be now without the horrific lawsuits that have been plastered all over the media. But, we can simply see that there is still a very strong growth trend.

Source: P2Pnet