Napster Present On 30 Percent Of PCs Report

A Web site that analyzes personal computers
reported today that Napster software was installed on 30 percent
of the PCs it tested last month.

The rising number of Napster-equipped PCs has now surpassed
computers bearing such heavyweight software packages as Microsoft
Works, Microsoft Money, ICQ, Intuit Quicken, and McAfee VirusScan, said
Rob Cheng, president of PC Pitstop LLC, in an interview with Newsbytes.
"We're actually going inside the PC, so we know all this stuff," Cheng
said.

At its current growth rate, Napster is on track to compete with other
freely downloaded applications such as WinAmp, WinZip, RealPlayer
and Adobe Acrobat.

Last month's 30 percent Napster rate compares to just 12 percent
in March, when PC Pitstop began keeping track of how many PCs
contain software of Napster, Scour and Gnutella. While way behind
Napster, both sites have grown considerably in the past six months,
Scour from 0 percent in March to 5.6 percent and Gnutella from
.06 percent to 1.6 percent.

Month-to-month growth was steady through the period, except for
a 4 percent drop in July, a wobble PC Pitstop attributes to publication
of a list of 300,000 Napster users by Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich,
and Napster's growing legal problems.

Napster was sued by a number of record companies and music
publishers represented by the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association
(NMPA). The groups allege that Napster is contributing to copyright
infringement and should be shut down.

The extraordinary growth of Napster is demonstrated in unique visits
to the site, which rose from 1.1 million in February to 4.9 million in
July, according to Media Metrix. And the May-to-June unique visit
count - during the time the Napster court battle was heating up -
rose from 3.2 million to 4.7 million, Media Metrix said.

"That's really not a good measurement," Cheng said. "That doesn't
mean they're going to use (Napster). There is a better way to look at
this, to see whether software is (on PCs)."

The findings suggest that new technology used by Napster and other
file-sharing sites boosts the demand for broadband Internet connections.
Napster PCs are close to 50 percent more likely to have a broadband
connection; overall, 48 percent of Napster PCs had a broadband
connection, compared to 36 percent of the general population, the study
found.

"This is one of the fundamental reasons people are adopting this
technology," Cheng said.

The study also showed that 38 percent of Napster PCs have a CD-rewritable
drive compared to 26 percent of the general PC population; have hard
drives
that average 14.6 gigabytes (GB) while PCs average just over 12GB; and
have 4.9 GB of digital information stored, compared to the general PC
population with only 3.6 GB.

PC Pitstop took to the Internet March 3, billing itself as an "online
Jiffy Lube"
that diagnoses PCs and lets users know what's wrong and how to improve
their computer's performance. Findings are based on 45,482 PC examinations
in September, PC Pitstop said, noting that its tests cannot determine
whether
the software is actually being used.

The site said it does not look at user files, browser history information
or
credit card data, and does not copy data from drives to its database or
collect aggregate information.

PC Pitstop is on the Web at http://www.pcpitstop.com.