The 9 Top Music Pirate Countries

We hear less about it these days because online music streaming has become the hot button issue, but there's still a good bit of music piracy that goes on all over the world. Musicmetric has compiled a report called The Digital Music Index that found that there were over 400 million illegal downloads after watching Bittorrent for the first 6 months of the year. They broke it down by country, and here's what they found.

1. US - 96.68 million.
Most downloaded artist: Drake

2. UK - 43.26 million.
Most downloaded artist: Ed Sheeran

3. Italy - 33.15 million.
Most downloaded artist: Laura Pausini

4. Canada - 23.95 million.
Most downloaded artist: Kenye West

5. Brazil - 19.72 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

6. Australia - 19.23 million.
Most downloaded artist: Hilltop Hoods

7. Spain - 10.3 million.
Most downloaded artist: Pablo Alberan

8. India - 8.96 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

9. France - 8.39 million.
Most downloaded artist: Sexion d'Assaut

I'm actually surprised at how low these numbers are. If you listen to the RIAA, they should be about 20 times higher, but here we have empirical data that shows that while pirating still continues it's not to the level that the music industry tells us.

Still, if you're a record label, it must be distressing that 400 million potential sales were left on the table. That said, how many of those would've been turned into a sale if piracy were eliminated? My guess is that it wouldn't have been even half of that total, and spread out world-wide, the potential revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to what major record labels deal with every day. If anything, this study shows that streaming music is beginning to take hold and piracy is decreasing.

It will be interesting to visit this again next year. I bet the numbers will be a lot lower.

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