Thanks to the popularity of streaming services and the increasing convenience of digital music platforms, music piracy is reportedly on the decrease, falling by as much as a third in Great Britain where it’s now labelled “a minor activity.”
But new figures from an anti-piracy monitoring group show that illegal downloads still operate in huge numbers, gathering a report that shows the most pirated bands and artists in the world with some interesting results.
Anti-piracy group MUSO has compiled the Top 10 most pirated list, gathering data from piracy websites that have complied with their takedown requests.
MUSO scans millions of online sources – including cyberlocker sites, illegal streaming services, and torrent pages – for illegally uploaded material to help music industry groups and labels to protect their copyrighted releases and music catalogues online.
The most pirated artist by MUSO’s analysis? With nearly 190,000 per year? It’s The Beatles, making them not only arguably the most influential and important artist of their generation, but the most attractive to music pirates as well, as Music Week reports.
The Fab Four top the list by a significant margin, with the group’s music removed from pirated sites with an average of 1,000 downloads per file, which equates to 187,687 illegal downloads per annum.
That figure might not only account for the deathless popularity of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but also due to the late availability of their music to the digital realm, as music blogger Alan Cross points out, with The Beatles catalogue only made available on iTunes in 2010.
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Additionally, the MUSO report doesn’t account for P2P file sharing sites, such as The Pirate Bay, which means that the figure could potentially be even larger .
The next most pirated band in the world, in a very distant second place with 72,984 illegally uploaded files per annum, is West Coast pop-rock legends Fleetwood Mac, who recently cancelled their Australian tour – set to kick off last weekend – as their bassist John McVie undergoes treatment for cancer.
Bob Marley, still one of the highest earning dead musicians, comes third place on the list, with 60,024 tracked files, followed by the mighty Led Zeppelin (59,011 uploaded files) and – perhaps proving that the older generation are more savvy with illegal downloading than they were previously given credit for – Cliff Richard (56,576 uploaded files).
Further down the list is influential guitar hero Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Stevie Wonder, and ranking at #10, The Rolling Stones, which might help fuel those arguments that The Beatles really are better than their former contemporaries; or conversely, that sticking around might actually prove to be healthier for album sales than not.
The Most Pirated Artists In The World
source: Music Week
1. The Beatles – 187,687 uploaded files
2. Fleetwood Mac – 72,984 uploaded files
3. Bob Marley – 60,024 uploaded files
4. Led Zeppelin – 59,011 uploaded files
5. Cliff Richard – 56,576 uploaded files
6. Stevie Wonder – 45,496 uploaded files
7. Jimi Hendrix – 44,093 uploaded files
8. Elvis Presley – 40,794 uploaded files
9. ABBA – 35,193 uploaded files
10. The Rolling Stones – 34,444 uploaded files
