online distribution In the first decade of the 2000s, digitally downloaded and streamed music became more popular than buying physical recordings (e.g. CDs, records and tapes). This gave consumers almost "friction-less" access to a wider variety of music than ever before, across multiple devices. At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s. Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research. Worldwide revenues for CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads fell from $36.9 billion in 2000 to $15.9 billion in 2010 according to IFPI. The Economist and The New York Times reported that the downward trend was expected to continue for the foreseeable future. This dramatic decline in revenue has caused large-scale layoffs inside the industry, driven some more venerable retailers (such as Tower Records) out of business and forced record companies, record producers, studios, recording engineers and musicians to seek new business models. In response to the rise of widespread illegal file sharing of digital music-recordings, the record industry took aggressive legal action. In 2001 it succeeded in shutting down the popular music-website Napster, and threatened legal action against thousands of individuals who participated in sharing music-song sound-files. However, this failed to slow the decline in music-recording revenue and proved a public-relations disaster for the music industry. Some academic studies have even suggested that downloads did not cause the decline in sales of recordings. The 2008 British Music Rights survey showed that 80% of people in Britain wanted a legal peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service, however only half of the respondents thought that the music's creators should be paid. The survey was consistent with the results of earlier research conducted in the United States, upon which the Open Music Model was based. Legal digital downloads became widely available with the debut of the Apple iTunes Store in 2003. The popularity of music distribution over the Internet has increased, and by 2011 digital music sales topped physical sales of music. In 2008, Atlantic Records reports that digital sales have surpassed physical sales. However, as The Economist reported, "paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs". After 2010, Internet-based services such as Deezer, Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's iTunes Radio began