In an article about the legal strategy of the RIAA, the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the steady numbers of P2p users in 2007.

Music companies complain that file sharing, which violates copyright laws, is cutting into their profits, and they point to falling album sales as evidence. U.S. album sales fell 9.5 percent in 2007 from a year earlier, according to Nielsen SoundScan.But the recording industry’s aggressive campaign against music piracy has earned it enmity. Critics say that suing potential customers is unwise and they call on music companies to find a successful business model for the digital era rather than trying to protect a failing one.Whether the association’s legal strategy is working is unclear.

Several years of sharp growth in the use of peer-to-peer networks, which also are used to share television clips and films, has ended, according to BigChampagne, a company that measures the use of the networks. Still, the average number of users on such networks at any one time remained at around 9.3 million globally in 2007, about the same as it was a year earlier, the company found.

Music piracy is a $4.5 billion market.