UK Piracy Costing £680M?

Illegal downloads could be costing the UK music business as much as £680 million ($1.1 billion) per year, according to figures from the Musicmetric monitoring service.

Like most statistics related to piracy, they would appear to assume that people who downloaded something illegally would otherwise have purchased it.

Musicmetric logged the approximate locations of users obtaining music using peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent, and found that illegal downloads had cost £340 million in the last six months.

The Musicmetric sample also found that Ed Sheeran is the biggest loser as he’s the most illegally downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages covered by the research.

At its AGM July 3, British Phonographic Industry chairman Tony Wadsworth cited the international success of Sheeran, Adele, and One Direction as something the UK business should be proud of, although he also urged the government to take stronger action to combat piracy.

The Musicmetric sample also reveals how tastes – and the willingness to break the law – differ by region, with the worst culprits apparently coming from Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton and Liverpool. They were the four cities with the most illegal downloads per capita.

All of the top 10 towns and cities with the most downloads per person, which also included Sheffield, Leicester, Stoke-on-Trent, Glasgow, Cardiff and Leeds, have sizable student populations. 
 
When simply looking at the number of illegal downloads in each area, major population areas such as London, Birmingham and Glasgow predictably come out on top.
 
Musicmetric says that in the first half of the year, more than 7 million files – mostly full albums – were downloaded illegally in the capital through peer-to-peer file sharing.
 
The regional information threw up some interesting info, particularly concerning which acts are the most popular in which areas.
 
On the Isle of Wight, famous for its annual rock and pop music festival, the most illegally download artist based on monthly averages is Louis Armstrong.
 
At the other end of England, in the Scottish borders town of Galashiels, the most popular downloaded artist was The Smiths.
 
Justin Bieber also had a good geographical spread, proving to be especially popular in the Oxfordshire village of Kidlington and the Norfolk coastal town of Great Yarmouth.
 
In Bournemouth it seems they prefer the Eagles.