The New York Times reports that, officially, everybody and their grandmother illegally downloads music from the Internet using programs like BitTorrent. Five billion songs were downloaded from P2P networks in 2006 versus 509 million from legitimate music stores like iTunes, according to the NPD research group. Many users say it’s simply easier to download music from P2P apps, especially when you can grab entire albums in just a few minutes (or seconds).

Another interesting tidbit from the released data shows that people who download large amounts of music from P2P networks tend to have high capacity hard drives. They must be onto something, since I’ve got a 500GB My Book sitting right next to my computer and have been burning through P2P bandwidth since I was a youngling.

Peer-to-Peer Downloaders Gorge on Songs [New York Times]