Folksy closing-ceremony invader Ed Sheeran has been pegged as the nation's most-pirated artist, with Manchester hailed the UK's biggest city for music sharing.
A new study, conducted by monitoring bods Musicmetric, looked at the approximate locations of surfers using BitTorrent to calculate which regions of our green and pleasant land were most rife with digital copying, and which artists were proving most popular.
Over 43 million albums and singles were downloaded illegally by Brits in the first half of this year, the BBC reports, with Manchester topping the list for illegal downloads per person -- followed by Nottingham, Southampton and Liverpool.
Ed Sheeran is the most-downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 UK locations tested, with his album + proving inexplicably popular with the BitTorrent crowd. Rihanna's Talk that Talk and Frank Ocean's Channel Orange claim the second and third spots.
The BBC has put together a rather excellent app that lets you see who the most-pirated artist in your area is. You may be interested to know that folks in Scunthorpe are more into Madonna than the rest of the UK, or that Horsham in West Sussex was clocked as downloading Ed Sheeran an average of 53 times, but is also keen on David Bowie.
The Isle of Wight's most popular artist is Louis Armstrong, while St Andrews is all about guitar-strangling stadium rockers Muse.
A BPI representative told the Beeb that the figures show music piracy "remains a significant problem," while the much-pirated Ed Sheeran took a more laid-back approach, noting, "I'm still selling albums, but I'm selling tickets at the same time. My gig tickets are, like, £18 and my albums £8, so... it's all relative."
What do you think about music piracy, and how do you rate the nation's taste in music? Tell me in the comments below, or over on our Facebook wall.
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Comments 6
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anonymous 17 September, 2012 12:03
I think the future of music lies in live shows. if you don't download the music you just listen to it on Youtube. The music industry need to see this if they are going to make any money.
Rich Trenholm 17 September, 2012 13:04
Problem is, live shows aren't scalable - there's a finite number of gigs you can play and each gig has a finite number of tickets to sell, whereas if you release a record there's no limit to the numbers of copies it could sell.
damien2501 17 September, 2012 14:05
I don't think there is a way to stop pirating music it's gone too far now. There should be an easy way to contribute to a band if you did download music for free and liked it, rather than being told not to all the time maybe bands should embrace it and try and get money from it
anonymous 17 September, 2012 14:05
also how will people get the money to put live shows on, when they can't get money from sales?
billfred 17 September, 2012 16:00
No surprise, who would pay for this crap?
anonymous 17 September, 2012 17:52
the statistics are not a true reflection on the amount of people that down load an album then copy it to a cd/mp3 player then listen to it. it hyped up to make a good story.
in the 80's we swapped tapes in the playground,
in the 90's we swapped CD's
in 2k we downloaded MPS from the internet.
Whats changed?
People believe they can monitor the downloads and believe that every download is a lost sale!
but this is not true!
Close the internet stop all downloads and sales will not increase to reflect the amount of downloads, though what will change is the way people swap tunes.