Music Fans torrent 759 million songs in six months, Gainesville, FL named America's "pirate capital"
A new report released by MusicMetric–the first of its kind–shows that Americans torrented more than 97 million albums (78%) and singles (22%) during the first half of 2012. At 10 songs per album, that adds up to 759 million songs. The report also named Gainesville, FL, Albany, GA, Fairbanks, AK, Lexington, KY and Tallahassee, FL as the top BitTorrenting areas in America.
Neilsen Soundscan's numbers for the same time period show that 150 million albums were sold in the U.S., over 50 million more than were BitTorrented. The report's in-depth portion also showed that unlicensed file-sharing was decreasing in areas where services like Spotify are available and that YouTube was the most popular service for streaming music with 3.5 billion plays in the last 12 months.
Read the entire press release on the report here. It goes on to discuss other high-ranking areas, the top downloaded releases (which includes Jay-Z & Kanye's Watch The Throne and Drake's Take Care), social media and much more.
With this being the first in-depth report on BitTorrenting habits, how does this strike you? What do you think of the fact that this report shows that more albums were legally sold than torrented?
