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A new report from market research company The NPD Group shows that Apple's ITunes Music Store is proving to be more popular than many peer-to-peer file sharing services.

According to NPD's MusicWatch Digital Service, ITunes is in a dead heat with P-to-P service LimeWire, and is beating out other services like Kazaa and IMesh.

The NPD Group estimates that four percent of Internet-enabled households in the U.S. used a paid music download store for the month of March 2005. A large number of those users were more than 30 years old and had an average household income of $83,000.

NPD says that post-college consumers are more likely to buy music rather than steal it, compared to younger consumers.

"They have diminishing free time, and more disposable income," says Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group's Music and Movies division, in a statement.

Viable Alternative

Crupnick calls the results of ITunes and two other pay-to-play services on the top ten list--Napster and the Real Player Store--proof positive that "digital download stores appear to have created a compelling and economically viable alternative to illegal file sharing."

At the top of the list was WinMX, a Windows P-to-P service that NPD claims is used by 2.1 million households. ITunes and LimeWire saw use by 1.7 million households. Kazaa came in fourth, followed by BearShare, Ares Galaxy, Napster, Morpheus, Real Player Store, and IMesh.

The survey was conducted by collecting data from Windows-based PCs used by 40,000 online panelists. The information compares March 2005 to March 2004 household activity of consumers who had acquired digital music either through paid services or P-to-P file sharing services.