Last week, the Digital Music News Research Group released its quarterly P2P report. The for-pay report covers the fourth quarter of 2007, but a publicly available excerpt breaks down the data for the period between September 2006 and September 2007. The data consists of snapshots of P2P application and protocol use collected from over 1.66 million Windows PCs. Gnutella is still the top P2P network, but BitTorrent has been steadily rising.

LimeWire still rules the P2P world. It is by far the most popular single P2P application, appearing on 36.4 percent of the machines surveyed as of last September. LimeWire also accounts for the overwhelming majority of Gnutella use among the top 13 of the 152 applications found on PCs. Gnutella was the protocol of choice for 40.5 percent of the PCs at the end of the period covered by the survey.

We reported last week that BitTorrent use jumped nearly 25 percent on average between November 2007 and March 2008, and the data in the Digital Music News Research Group shows some significant growth for BitTorrent in the previous period. In September 2006, 23.6 percent of the top 13 P2P apps used BitTorrent. A year later, that number grew over 19 percent, to 28.2 percent.



Data source: Digital Music News Research Group

There also appears to be some consolidation in the P2P market. In September 2006, the top 13 applications accounted for 72.8 percent of the market. A year later, that number had grown to nearly 80 percent. After LimeWire, the most popular P2P application is µTorrent, followed by BitTorrent, Ares, and Azureus. µTorrent's popularity soared during the survey period, with its market share growing from 3.0 percent in September 2006 to 11.3 percent a year later.



Data source: Digital Music News Research Group

Two new applications showed up in the survey beginning in January 2007. P4P codeveloper Pando, whose technology will be used by NBC for content distribution, had its software first show up in the survey in May; it captured 0.9 percent of the P2P software market in September 2007. Similarly, Gnutella client Frostwire started with 0.4 percent of the market in January 2007 and grew to 1.2 percent by September.

Although BitTorrent is growing at a faster pace than Gnutella, LimeWire may continue to be the most popular application due to its recent addition of support for BitTorrent transfers. LimeWire faces a troubled future, however, due to an ongoing legal battle with the RIAA. The RIAA sued the P2P provider in August 2006, and LimeWire's countersuit alleging conspiracy on the part of the record labels was dismissed this past December.

Vilified by Big Content and some ISPs, BitTorrent clearly has the momentum right now. "All of the P2P growth we've seen over the past several months is in the torrent community," metrics firm BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland told Ars earlier this month.

P2P traffic has been increasingly shifting away from music towards TV and movies, and BitTorrent is much better suited to moving around the multiple-episode packs to TV shows that BigChampagne has seen growing in popularity. Feature films are also popular—Garland told Ars that the top 100 movies on BitTorrent saw swarms of 3.9 million users in November 2007, compared with 9.8 million in March 2008.

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