This is despite the recent success of Digital Download Day 2, the event organised by music company OD2 to raise the profile of legal internet music downloads, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
Digital Download Day helped OD2 attract 523,000 visitors during April to become the UK's fifth most popular music website for that month. Other paid-for download sites are increasing the size of their audiences, including subscription site Emusic.com with 165,000 UK users in the quarter to March.
However, the numbers are a long way behind file-sharing sites such as Kazaa.com, the most popular, which attracted more than 1.3m people in April, and WinMX.com, which attracted nearly 400,000 in the same month.
Tom Ewing, European market analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings: "Kazaa actually performs less well in the UK than in most European countries and even then its audience figures don't represent the full extent of file-sharing by any means. Kazaa, WinMX and similar sites allow users to download software, which they use to share files without accessing the web."
Despite the music industry being suspicious of the internet as a medium for selling music, the top 10 clearly shows that music retailers, like CD-Wow and HMV, are attracting higher online audiences than any paid download site.
"The problem for paid download sites is that while security, legitimacy and convenience are their main advantages over the file-sharing communities, those advantages are also shared by sites which sell actual CDs. It remains to be seen whether paid-content music sites can become a mass audience proposition, rather than a successful niche, while the file-sharing communities are still thriving," Ewing said.
However, the situation could change. The survey was done prior to Apple Computer launcing its iTunes download service, which has been very successful in its first few weeks of business.
Apple is also in talks with Amazon.com to make the computer firm's new online music store available on Amazon, which could dramatically expand the legal download market.
Top 10 music websites in the UK April 2003
1. 1.3m unique users
2. 739,000
3. 628,000
4. 552,000
5. 523,000
6. 391,000
7. 276,000
8. 218,000
9. 194,000
10. 165,000
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