Survey underlines scale of UK piracy.(The BPI campaign)

The BPI based its case for pursuing file-sharers on new research which suggests that the scale of illegal downloading dwarfs any previous estimates for the UK.

Late last year, the BPI and the British Videogram Association commissioned TNS--the research company formerly knows as Taylor Nelson Sofres--to conduct a survey on their attitudes to and experiences of downloading music.

After polling 3,667 12- to 74-year-olds, the company indicated that 17.8% of those polled said they are downloading music. This proportion was upweighted to indicate that 8.0m people are using their computers to download music.

Of those which admitted to downloading music, 92% said they did so through illegal sites, equivalent to 7.4m people if similarly upweighted. Some 57% used file-sharing services such as KaZaA and Grokster.

The research also suggests that younger consumers are more likely to download music. While 12- to 19-year-olds account for 12% of the population and 16% of spending on music, they account for 29% of downloaders (see chart).

The biggest offenders are 15 to 19 year-olds (9% of the population), who account for 13% of all music spending, but almost a fifth (19%) of all tracks downloaded. In turn, 20- to 24-year olds make up 12% of spending and 9% of downloading.

Younger consumers tend to be heavier users of download services. Nearly half (47%) of downloaders aged under 25 accessed more than 10 tracks in the previous month (see chart).