Music piracy more popular than ever, according to new report

Music Piracy, Piracy, Media, Digital Piracy, Jail, Arrests,

Music piracy in 2017 rose 14.7 percent over that of 2016, with 73.9 billion visits to music piracy sites worldwide, according to piracy data insight tracker MUSO’s 2017 Global Piracy Report. The annual report measures piracy from over 30,000 of the highest traffic sites for all formats – including web streaming, download and torrenting.

The report also found there were 300.2 billion visits to piracy sites last year, up 1.6 percent from 2016 when accounting for each sector, and the United States is the leading perpetrator.

Billboard highlights the facts that the music category’s 73.9 billion visits, MUSO’s data separates sites into five different distinctions: web streaming sites (30.5 billion); web download sites (21.2 billion); streaming ripping sites (15.7 billion); public torrent sites (6 billion) and private torrent sites (500 million). Notably, music piracy is heavily skewed toward mobile users: 87.13 percent of those visits overall were accessed via mobile, compared to just 52 percent for TV piracy.

“There is a belief that the rise in popularity of on-demand services such as Netflix and Spotify have solved piracy, but that theory simply doesn’t stack up,“ MUSO co-founder/CEO Andy Chatterly said in a statement accompanying the report. “Our data suggests that piracy is more popular than ever.”

The findings of the MUSO report support other reports on piracy in recent years. If you recall, a report posted on this blog a little under two years ago cited the piracy in 2015 as being the worse of all-time. That report respected the total rate of piracy to double by 2020 and – at least based on this report from MUSO – that appears to be what will happen.

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James Shotwell