An NPD Group report is right now making the rounds touting an apparent decline in the illicit use of P2P networks to pirate music since the shutdown of LimeWire last October. The study cites a drop in overall P2P piracy from 16% in 2007 to 9% in 2010—among other statistics—which seems to be a strange timeline as there’s no sign of how much of that drop happened before the shutdown of LimeWire.

An article at TorrentFreak summarizes a lot of the conclusions from the data gathered by NPD Group,

Although there are plenty of alternatives to LimeWire, NPD found that the number of people who downloaded music illicitly using P2P in the last quarter of 2010 has decreased by 43% compared to the year before. The researchers conclude that much of the decline is due to the unavailability of LimeWire, which ceased its operations just a few weeks into quarter 4 of last year.

This data comes from an extensive survey of 5,549 Americans, and translated into the entire population it means that the number of music pirates has decreased from 28 million to 16 million in just a year.

Looking at the market share of the various P2P applications, LimeWire was still in the lead with 32 percent of the music pirates indicating that they’d used it in the few weeks that it was still available. This is down from 56 percent in the year before.

It’s really hard to gauge the full context of this report, especially noting that in one case it covers an entire year and another segment compares 2007 to 2010. To declare that the loss of LimeWire precipitated a sudden drop requires a lot more longitudinal data than seems to be available in these reports—especially noting that there’s a lot of time for the decline before the shuttering of LimeWire.

A lot of these problems are outlined by Alex Wexelblat at Copyfight; however, it doesn’t seem like he goes quite far enough in his analysis.

To my eyes, the fact that the survey covers only P2P traffic it’s carefully avoiding any other avenues that the public has for trading music—such as Facebook, Twitter, upload sites, YouTUBE videos, et cetera. Music is saturating our social media right now more than ever and if someone really wants it, it’s not hard to grab it from the airwaves without having to use a torrent or a P2P program. I wonder if the drop in P2P piracy in the US is correlated with a drop in total use of P2P programs in general.

The press release about the NPD Group’s report seems well-tilted to carefully ignore these factors and it’s being spun as if the RIAA’s defeat of LimeWire is meaningful to Internet piracy in general, when it’s probably not. It’s meaningful to the use of LimeWire; but when it comes down to the culture of the Internet the act may have come on the cusp of the shift away from P2P to social media anyway.

Of course, the report did give lip service to the fact that the moment it looked like LimeWire was going down in flames alternatives were already being sought—and it looks like numerous other P2P networks gained in membership from the cast-off. The entire report doesn’t seem to cover all its bases, the conclusions aren’t entirely supported by the evidence and ignore externalities… It has all the makings of marketing puffery to make the RIAA and others look good after they’ve taken tremendous blows in moral popularity due to file sharing lawsuits against their own customers and just generally making themselves look bad in the name of revenues.