Rihanna is the world’s most illegally downloaded artist

A survey by Musicmetric indicates that the artist Rihanna is the world’s most illegally downloaded music artist. The country recording the most illegal downloads is the U.S., followed by the UK.

A survey by Musicmetric has shown that Rihanna's latest album - Talk That Talk - was found to be the world's most pirated release, with some 1,228,313 downloads for the period January to July 2012. In relation to the country recording the most illegal downloads, the US is at the top. For the same period, over 96 million illegal downloads were made. Second on the list was the UK, with some 40 million illegal downloads. Following the U.S. and UK is Italy (33 million illegal downloads), then Canada (nearly 24 million illegal downloads), and Brazil (almost 20 million illegal downloads). The Musicmetric survey focused on BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is a way of obtaining files by downloading from many users at the same time. Musicmetric is a music industry backed service which provides insights and understanding into consumer behavior online globally for the entertainment industry. The figures do indicate global variation. Whilst Rihanna occupies the number one spot globally and in the USA, in the UK, according to the BBC, artist Ed Sheeran was number one, followed by Rizzle Kicks and then Rihanna. Sheeran’s album + (Plus) was downloaded on average 55,512 times every month, with the city of Manchester the are region in which the highest number of illegal downloads were made. The survey was made following moves by Google to block file sharing websites from appearing in its search results. The figures show that illegal downloading continues to be a major international issue. In terms of the artists listed, this data suggests, as the Daily Telegraph opines, that the main demographic for illegal downloading relates to younger people.