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Two reasons for sorrow: popularity of illegal downloading and Ed Sheeran
Over 345 million songs were illegally downloaded in the first half of 2012 in the UK alone.
Illegal downloaders failed to exhibit any taste - with Ed Sheeran's album + getting the dubious honour of being 'most pirated UK album'.
The fluffy-haird warbler is closely followed by Rizzle Kicks (Stereo Typical), with Rihanna (Talk Talk Talk), Jessie J (Who You Are) and Olly Murs (In Case You Didn't Know) making up the top five.
Sheeran's album was top choice for illegal downloaders in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages included in the research. Fair play to Sheerhan, who said it was "quite a nice feeling" that nine million people had his record. Only 1.2 million people paid for it.
"I'm still selling albums, but I'm selling tickets at the same time," Sheeran told the BBC.
The study, conducted by Musicmetric, looked at 18 billion downloads from the BitTorrent file-sharing service. More than three billion songs were illegally downloaded worldwide in the first half of 2012.
Unsurprisingly the US topped the list of illegally downloaded songs, with the UK in second.
The lesson? The UK likes illegally downloading music. And Ed Sheeran. Both are crimes.
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It's no wonder
I'm old fashioned - I buy CD's. I like to get a physical product but rip and play them on my PC. Sheeran's + album has a 'bonus material' link that runs when the CD is inserted in a computer drive.....so I can play the bonus bloody material - but not what I have purchased. No wonder this CD is the 'most pirated'. I will just have to find a torrent site and join the masses ....... Is that illegal ?????
Posted by Perhaps if you could play the CD, 12 Oct 2012
I agree
I agree. All I play music on is my PC. This CD is therefore useless since the morons have disabled that option. Well done, instead of making a sale I'll be sending the junk back for a refund & simply obtain it for free elsewhere.
Posted by Mark Hall, 19 Jan 2013