The record industry's largely successful effort to cripple Napster, the online music site turned social phenomenon, has left it facing something potentially worse: a new generation of music-swapping sites, more numerous and much harder to police.

Figures to be released today show that a precipitous drop in Napster's traffic over the past several weeks has been paralleled by explosive growth in less centralized services welcoming millions of Napster refugees.

"Napster is probably dead," said Brian Itschner, 29, a law-office manager in Tampa, Fla., and former Napster user who has moved to MusicCity.com. "But it hasn't stopped this" free-music exchange movement.

Six of the alternative services had 320,000 to 1.1 million users each in May, according to figures to be released from Jupiter Media Metrix, a Web traffic measuring service. Five of those services had little traffic or did not exist in February.

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Those figures are consistent with those from other services that track Internet use. Last week, people initiated downloads of 1.1 million copies of software for the Music City service on Download.com, a software clearinghouse offered by Cnet Networks on which hundreds of programs are available. The program, called Morpheus, was the single most widely downloaded program on the site. The second most popular was also a file-exchange program, Audiogalaxy Satellite, with 977,000 downloads.

Other programs used to exchange music, called BearShare, LimeWire, KaZaA and iMesh, were all among the top 10 most downloaded programs on Download.com. They have emerged, industry analysts say, as users have become accustomed to obtaining music online but as a vacuum was created by the demise of Napster and the failure of record labels to quickly create their own for-pay services. The record companies have promised to create for-pay services by summer's end.

"With Napster not working, all 50 million users are most likely seeking an alternative," said Scott Arpajian, vice president of Cnet Download.com.

Napster has been out of service since July 1, when the company stopped all file sharing so that it could integrate new technology to allow it to better block the trading of copyrighted files not authorized for exchange. The company, which is under a court order to block such files, said its filtering system was 99 percent effective, but said it had not decided when to put the service back up. It, too, has pledged to offer a pay service by summer's end.

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