In a recent study by British Music Rights, 14- to 24-year-olds were polled as to how much stolen music they carried around on a daily basis. The finding was that almost half of said music was never purchased. 842 of the 1,770 tracks held on the average digital music player were reported as stolen-that's 48 percent.
In addition, half of this group was happy to share all of their music, though probably more often through BitTorrent than Times Online's "hundreds, or thousands, of songs at any one time" postulation. Another point that's not quite clear is whether or not CD backups were considered to be stolen tracks. If so, these numbers become extremely tough to interpret.
Still, 80% of the music pirates said that they'd pay about £10/month for a subscription service. Now if we could only find a subscription service that offered as many tracks as the entire dark alley of the internet, we'd really have something. [Times Online]