The NYT editorialized on Apple’s deal with the music industry to offer downloads free of DRM the other day:

It […] is recognizing something fundamental about music lovers that restriction-free online vendors know. Most of us will buy, not steal, digital music, even if it lacks copyright protection. Shared music is the best advertisement for the music we will eventually purchase.

For the record, that second sentence isn’t true in any sense. I don’t care how many billions of songs Apple sells at the iTunes Store, many, many more are exchanged on the file sharing networks and many, many more than that—orders of magnitude more—are spread around on the bit torrent networks.

Consider this: Just one of these sites, Mininova, boasts that about 150,000 downloads have been made of a single Radiohead discography torrent of 60 or 70 tracks over the past year—and that 700 people are seeding the torrent right now.

Many other similar collections are available there and on the myriad other major torrent sites—and note that this doesn’t even count the torrents available for individual Radiohead albums.

So let’s do some crude math. I found nine other sites with the same torrent. To be conservative and to get a round number let’s include just north of six of these. Multiply the 150,000 downloads times roughly six to get an even million, and then multiply that by the 60 tracks in the collection.

That indicates that just that one torrent of a single artist spread at least 60 million tracks of that artist around the Internet over the last year.

That’s equal to one percent of Apple’s claim of six billion iTunes Store tracks sold total in the last five years or so.

And remember: That doesn’t count the other Radiohead discography torrents available now and in previous years; the torrents of individual albums; the songs exchanged on the regular file-sharing networks; and the songs ripped from friends’ CDs.

A guess? Radiohead alone, in one year, might account for unauthorized sharing equaling between five and ten percent of the iTunes Stores’ total cumulative sales.

And remember—Radiohead was never that big of a band, saleswise.

Just for fun, I took a look at the available Beatles discographies. Sixteen torrents were available. Just one of these was offered on twelve sites. The Mininova site (which I’m using again because it tracks the number of downloads), has had it up for only five days, and shows almost 20,000 downloads.

This particular discography contains more than 300 tracks. In other words, in five days one torrent on one site was responsible for the dissemination of six million Beatles tracks.

In five days! And that site was one of twelve. And that particular torrent was one of sixteen.

Not every torrent site may be that big, and not every torrent is completed. Let’s cut those numbers in half to be conservative and let’s do the math again.

Take six million times six (half of twelve) times eight (half of sixteen)—and it’s likely that at least 300 million Beatles tracks were disseminated in the form of “discography” torrents alone in the past year.

And again, that doesn’t count the individual torrented albums, or files exchanged on non-torrent networks like Lime Wire. All told, the Beatles probably had a half-billion files exchanged illegally in 2008.

Finally, let’s take this one more step.

The industry is now selling 450 million CD equivalents a year. The Beatles sell two million CDs a year, roughly, or, crudely, a half of one percent of the sales.

For the sake of the argument, let’s say the group’s online music profile parallels its terrestrial percentage. Multiply 500 million tracks times 200 and you get …

… 100 billion tracks distributed online in one year, or 100 times as many as iTunes claims as sales.