A fresh study into piracy by Musicmetric’s Digital Music Index has looked into the extent of illegal file-sharing across the U.K. It doesn’t read too well for those on the front line of battling piracy! While everybody in the industry has their own opinion on how to ‘fix’ this issue, it still rages on. One thing we do know is there isn’t a magic solution that we can implement to make it all disappear.
The study observed the extent of illegal file-sharing across the U.K. and the rest of the world in the first 6 months of the year. The research covers music file-sharing patterns via BitTorrent. The U.K. comes second in the worldwide chart of BitTorrent downloads with 43,263,582 downloads, second to the U.S. which had 96,681,133. The chart below puts these numbers in relation to country population.
| Country Name | Total Downloads | Approx. Songs | Country Population | |
| 1 | United States | 96,681,133 | 775,382,687 | 313,232,044 |
| 2 | United Kingdom | 43,263,582 | 346,973,928 | 62,698,362 |
| 3 | Italy | 33,158,943 | 265,934,723 | 61,016,804 |
| 4 | Canada | 23,959,924 | 192,158,590 | 34,030,586 |
| 5 | Brazil | 19,724,522 | 158,190,666 | 194,037,075 |
| 6 | Australia | 19,232,252 | 154,242,661 | 21,766,711 |
| 7 | Spain | 10,303,633 | 82,635,137 | 46,754,784 |
| 8 | India | 8,964,360 | 71,894,167 | 1,189,172,906 |
| 9 | France | 8,398,550 | 67,356,371 | 65,102,719 |
| 10 | Philippines | 8,380,208 | 67,209,268 | 101,833,938 |
Breaking down the U.K. further, here are the top 10 cities for piracy in the same time period arranged per capita:
| City | Downloads over 6 month period |
| London | 4,565,502 |
| Manchester | 1,317,012 |
| Nottingham | 598,621 |
| Southampton | 480,151 |
| Liverpool | 927,535 |
| Sheffield | 748,301 |
| Leicester | 487,406 |
| Stoke-on-trent | 380,872 |
| Glasgow | 1,037,934 |
| Cardiff | 348,603 |
It’s clear people still very much like to consume music but their consumption of music is drastically changing, and so is the mindset of a music consumer. I believe our job working on the forefront of the digital music world is to continue be inventive in the way we monetize music. Being static to the changing world around us and complaining about it isn’t going to change the situation. Fighting piracy is of course a must and the people doing such a thing do a vital job. But being creative and driving the industry forward shouldn’t be overlooked. We need to engage the people who pirate music not just fight them.
