In its 2010 annual report (PDF), recorded music's global trade body said that the industry would "struggle to survive unless we address the fundamental problem of piracy." Just how "fundamental" a problem is that piracy? Not very, as new research suggests that only 9 percent of US Internet users even use peer-to-peer networks at all, down substantially from 2007.

Market research firm NPD Group, which tracks music acquisition, said today that P2P use has dropped from 16 percent of all US Internet users to 9 percent over the last three years. The latest data comes from the fourth quarter of 2010, when a federal judge shut down LimeWire; that may have depressed the numbers a bit, though NPD notes that other P2P programs saw more usage as a result.

As for the average number of downloads per person, that also fell from 35 per quarter in 2007 to 18 per quarter by the end of 2010. Those averages obscure people who swap thousands of files, of course, but they also suggest that many P2P users only pick up a few tracks.

The data fits roughly with similar data collected by Warner Music and shown to the FCC in early 2010. Warner suggested that 13 percent of consumers were avowed pirates, but noted that even the pirates spent (some) money on recorded music.

The NPD numbers are not a complete view of the piracy problem. The company surveys only P2P use and so would not include one-click download sites and illegal online streaming services that have become more important for the movie business, in particular.

Still, the NPD data suggests that, in the US at least, piracy isn't the "fundamental" problem it's perceived to be. (Even Warner admits that pirates "tend to drive high discovery for others" and to spend some of their own money on music.) In developing economies, where piracy rates can reach north of 90 percent for music, movies, and software, it's a much more fundamental issue for content companies.

How should they address it? A major three-year academic research project has just concluded that piracy in developing economies is a "global pricing problem" that enforcement alone cannot fix.