Music is 50 percent of internet traffic?

In an article about Apple selling more than 2 million songs already, an interesting tidbit came up:

Music is one of the most popular categories on the Internet. [Smith Barney analyst Richard] Gardner pointed out in his note that traffic to music sites represent 50 to 55 percent of all Internet traffic.

Woah. If that’s accurate, that would be a sign of huge demand. Note to music biz types: look in the dictionary under “opportunity”. Even with the fact that Apple’s service only runs on Macs and still has somewhat restrictive DRM, they’ve sold 2 million songs in 16 days. Impressive.

Prediction: more services will follow suit offering features similar to the ones that Apple offers. People will start signing up for these services. As they start replacing their computers and running into the hassles of moving their music to their new computers, there will be a new backlash against DRM. Finally, after years of stupid bickering, the music industry will relent and release music in a format that has no DRM. After which time, music industry revenue will increase to a new record level until the next new technology comes along.