By BENNY EVANGELISTA
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

The threat of legal action by the record industry prompted more than 2 million U.S. households to delete all the music that they had stored in their computers during the summer, according to a new report.

The message is getting through to consumers, “but they’re resenting it,” said Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, an independent research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a group in Washington, D.C., that represents the world’s biggest record labels, started gathering evidence in late June to sue people who were sharing songs using popular online programs such as Kazaa.

The NPD Group bases its projections on data gathered from 40,000 PC users who have volunteered for a research study. The research firm estimates that 1 million households deleted all the music files stored on their computers in July, followed by 1.4 million in August.

About 500,000 additional households deleted their songs in September, when the association filed the first of 341 lawsuits targeting people who were illegally offering 1,000 or more songs for others to download.

The number of songs downloaded also fell 9 percent between August and September.

The computer owners probably acted out of fear of lawsuits or recognition that sharing files is illegal, Crupnick said. Some also could have moved the songs to other storage media such as recordable CDs, he said.

Typically about two-thirds of those songs were downloaded over the Internet, while the rest were legally copied into the computer from CDs, Crupnick said.

NPD also estimated that there are still 35 million to 40 million households with an average of 250 songs on their hard drives.

In a separate survey of 5,000 people ages 13 and older, the NPD found that two-thirds of regular file sharers and 40 percent of the consumers who had not recently downloaded any music had a negative opinion of the record companies.

“The music industry’s success in reducing file sharing has been impressive,” Crupnick said. “But now the real work of winning back the hearts and minds of consumers must begin.”