The first edition of the DMI has just been released and claims to be the most in-depth study ever of the global digital music landscape.

In addition to looking at licensed services such as Spotify, Deezer, 7Digital and iTunes, Musicmetric look how artists engage with fans through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and sharing sites such as Soundcloud, Last.fm, YouTube and blogs. But naturally what we are most interested in is their analysis of worldwide BitTorrent networks.

The DMI report spans 2011-2012 but Musicmetric says their look at BitTorrent covers the first half of 2012. The company says it tracked music from a total of 750,000 artists and discovered 405 million music releases downloaded in the first six months of this year. Of this total, more than 10% (43 million) were in the UK. Confirming that albums are more popular than singles on BitTorrent, Musicmetric says 78% of the UK downloads were albums.

So who is the most popular artist on BitTorrent?

Earlier this year dubstep artists Bill Van setup a deal with BitTorrent Inc to distribute his Cardigan EP. That appears to have paid off. The release is the number one torrent being downloaded in 5 of the top 20 countries worldwide as measured by number of downloads.

“It has become hugely popular in place of other illegal content in a quarter of the top 20 countries for downloads,” Musicmetric explain.

So which countries are flying high when it comes to BitTorrent downloads?

Perhaps unsurprisingly topping the list is the United States with just under 96.7 million downloads. Drake is the most popular artist with BitTorrent users stateside.

In second place and punching seriously above its weight is the UK with just under 43.4 million, with singer songwriter Ed Sheeran taking the top slot.

Italy comes in third with 33.2 million downloads, with pop songstress Laura Pausini proving most popular, followed by Canada (Kanye West) and Brazil (Billy Van) completing the top 5 with 24 million and 19.7 million respectively.

Australia (Hilltop Hoods), Spain (Pablo Alboran), India (Billy Van), France (Sexion d’assaut), and the Philippines (Maroon 5) round off the top 10.

An extending edition of the report provides a much closer look at BitTorrent users in the UK.

The data shows that singer songwriter Ed Sheeran is the most downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 towns and cities covered by the DMI report. He’s sold 1.2 million albums, but 8 million have been downloaded illegally.

But despite the numbers (and his ultimate bosses at the BPI bemoaning the levels of piracy highlighted by the report), the news that so many of his fans are pirating his music isn’t a disappointment to the 21-year-old.

“There’s a decent balance between – you can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it’s all relative,” he said in a video interview.

When it comes to downloading from BitTorrent, the citizens of Manchester are the most prolific in the UK, followed by those from Nottingham, Southampton, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leicester. Residents of the UK’s second city, Birmingham, are beaten into a lowly 18th place, with Londoners just squeezing into the top 20 in the final position.

If you’re interested in discovering who is the most pirated artist near you, the BBC have set up a page where UK citizens can type in their postcode and get Musicmetric stats for their area.

In a nice touch the data created by Musicmetric has all been released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license and can be found here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Although we’ve been quite critical of such studies in the past, especially when they’re funded by the entertainment industry, we have to admit that this is one of the best reports we’ve seen to date. Those who are interested in the use of BitTorrent and how it compares to other file-sharing services should definitely have a read.

The researchers clearly know what BitTorrent is all about, and although several assumptions and methodological choices paint the outcome to a certain degree, there’s not much to complain about in the data they present. Unfortunately, however, even solid data can be easily misinterpreted in the press.

Over the last days several readers have pointed us to an article that appeared in two of the top tech news outlets, Wired and Ars Technica. The article – “Where have all the music pirates gone?” – is written by one of the best tech reporters we know, but in this case the conclusion is way off.

The article zooms in on Envisional’s breakdown of content types that are “most popular” among BitTorrent downloaders. For this analysis the Envisional researchers looked at the 10,000 most downloaded files on the PublicBitTorrent tracker in December 2010.

As it turns out, pornography and films are in the lead with 35.8 and 35.2 percent respectively. Music on the other hand can be found at the bottom of the list with a measly 2.9 percent. Sounds plausible so far, but the article failed to mention something that clearly affects the outcome.

The overview of the 10,000 “most popular” torrents is based on a snapshot of the number of leechers. In other words, the rank of the most popular torrents is based on the number of people people who were downloading a file at the time the tracker was polled, not those who already finished it (including seeders).

This obviously results in a huge bias since the average video file of BitTorrent is much larger than the average music file. Based on a sample of millions of torrents we found that the average video torrent is 1.73 GB while music torrents average at 214 MB. So, video files are 8 times the size of music files.

Larger file sizes mean longer download times, and this is one of the explanations why there are far less music files in the top 10,000. Movie torrent simply take longer to complete so there are generally more people listed as leechers. If the top 10,000 was based on actual completed downloads the percentage of music torrents would have been much higher.

We’re of course not arguing that more people download music on BitTorrent than movies, but based on the above it seems likely that the difference between the two categories in “actual” popularity (completed downloads in a given time) is being misrepresented. One thing’s certain, the music pirates have definitely not vanished from BitTorrent yet.

The original article does point out correctly that worldwide, the music industry is doing a much better job at presenting alternatives to piracy than the movie industry. Whether music piracy has gone down because of it is a different question though, and one that at least needs some comparison data in order to be answered correctly.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Of all BitTorrent sites, Mininova is currently in the lead, ranked 52thnd according to Alexa’s new and improved statistics. The Piratebay comes second, before isoHunt, Torrentz.com and btjunkie. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay has close to 25 million unique visitors per month.

It is not only the web traffic that got a traffic boost, the number of people using the Pirate Bay tracker has quadrupled compared to the population in December 2006, and is now at 12 million. The number of torrents has grown from 600,000 to 1,200,000 in the same period.

Hollywood is doing all it can to force The Pirate Bay offline, but it seems that the site only grows more and more, perhaps because of the extra publicity generated by anti-piracy activities. We saw a similar pattern two years ago, when the Pirate Bay nearly doubled their traffic after the raid by the Swedish police.

The expansion of The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites shows that BitTorrent’s popularity continues to grow, and there is no sign that this will stop anytime soon.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A few months we already reported that uTorrent overtook Azureus’ position as the most installed BitTorrent application, and this trend continues. LimeWire’s popularity on the other hand is declining worldwide. Nonetheless, it is still by far the most installed filesharing application.

LimeWire going down, uTorrent on the rise

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

The uTorrent user base on the other hand is rapidly growing. uTorrent installs more than doubled in nearly every part of the world in the last 12 months. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe (11.6%), as can be seen from the graph below.

As a result of uTorrent’s growth, other BitTorrent clients such as Azureus and BitComet are going downhill. Azureus and BitComet now have an average install rate of 1.4% and 1.7% respectively.

Regional Differences

The regional differences in popularity of p2p applications are also worth mentioning. The data show that uTorrent is far more popular in Europe (11.6%) than in the United States (5.1%). Limewire on the other hand is well-liked among Aussies (27.0%) and Canadians (27.2%), but has less followers in Latin America.

Emule is still very popular in Latin America, where 16% of the PCs have the application installed compared to only 1% in the United States and 3% in Europe.

Home vs. Business PCs

Unsurprisingly, P2P applications are more frequently installed on home computers versus PCs at the workplace. Nevertheless, almost one out of five PCs at work (18%) have at least one P2P application installed. For home computer this is little over 1 in three (36%)

P2P Market share 2008

We also compiled a pie chart of the market share of the different P2P applications as of January 1st 2008. Please note that the data is a bit skewed since most of the data comes from participants who were based in the United States. LimeWire is without a doubt the winner here.

Finally, we want to make it clear though that install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it.

Based on the amount of traffic that is generated by each P2P application, uTorrent would be the absolute winner.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The press releases put out by the recording industry focus solely on piracy for declining sales, while in reality there are so many reasons. Most have been covered so many times by the media and academics, but we’ll re-iterate a few here.

The Decline in Music Sales

The CD format has now been around for over 25 years. Back-catalogues have been re-released on the medium and consumers lapped it up, replacing their analogue copies of music they own. However, there’s only so many back-catalogues to buy, leaving consumers either only purchasing new music or none at all. A decline in CD sales is an indication of saturation in a market where innovation is lacking. There’s also only so many “best of’s”, “greatest hits” and other compilation albums consumers are going to buy before thinking “I already own three copies of most of these songs, why would I buy another one?”

Format-shifting, the art of moving from one medium to another is on the rise. In the past consumers have moved their collection of music to different formats, usually because of quality improvements and convenience, and paid for the privilege. Now it seems consumers don’t think they should have pay to move their collection of music to their computers and media players, and especially not pay to receive an inferior quality copy of something they already own. It just doesn’t make sense. “Illegally downloading” seems logical. Digital copies of music, which were until recently usually DRM crippled, and are still poor quality in relation to CDs, are simply unattractive.

The thought also never seems to occur to the music industry that perhaps Avril Lavigne, Utada Hikaru, Rihanna, T-Pain and Akon (the artists behind the top 5 digital downloads in 2007) are simply unattractive to the public. How much manufactured pop can society take?

The Problems With P2P Statistics

There is no doubt that piracy is on the rise. This in in part due to the aforementioned, overpriced, inferior or non-existing alternatives. This aside, it is absolutely ridiculous to compare downloads with actual sales. Let’s sum up a few of the reasons.

Firstly, just because someone chooses to download music via P2P doesn’t mean they’re doing it illegally. The recording industry has stated numerous times that it will not sue people for format-shifting, whereby consumers would want a digital copy of music they physically own. Why go to the hassle of copying a CD you own to your PC/media player, when someone else out there has done it for you? There’s a lot to consider when digitizing music from CD, though the one-click approaches of programs like iTunes would let you believe otherwise. Indeed their exists numerous guides on how to best digitize music you own, most notably jiGGafellz’ guide.

Secondly, do these numbers include the antics of MediaDefender? They flood P2P networks with fake files, which unsuspecting users will often download. How many fake files does someone download before managing to get a genuine copy? Even when they have a real copy, how many times before they get one in a high enough quality to suit them?

Thirdly, what about those who download with the sole intention of improving their share ratio on private sites? Sites like OiNK were notorious for users downloading popular releases with no intention of listening to them, just to try and better their ratio. Similarly, users often download entire albums just to listen to one track. While BitTorrent clients have the ability to do selective downloading, broadband connections are becoming so fast that users don’t feel the need to. Other P2P networks where albums might be shared in archives such as .zip, .rar or .tar remove the ability to selective download.

Fourthly, a great deal of people seem obsessed with discographies. They would download an artist’s entire back catalogue of music just because they like collecting, often without listening to it.

A New Business Model?

The million dollar question of course is, what should the recording industry do? We know that there is no straightforward answer to this question, but we speculated about some of the options before. The Internet has changed the way people interact with music. Sites like OiNK made is easy to find and share virtually every piece of music ever produced. Services like last.fm on their turn made it easy to discover new artists, and interact with other fans.

The Internet and filesharing technologies make it possible to make production (of the copies) and distribution costs disappear, yet the prices still don’t change. Why? Because they cling onto their old business models.

Today, the average consumer buys approximately 3/5 CDs a year. Let’s say the labels make $25 a year per consumer. Now, what if the record labels decided to make their entire collection available online, and charge people $2.50 a month for a subscription. This way they could easily double their revenue. New business models will emerge, and I’m pretty sure piracy will pretty much cease to exist. The record industry can even outsource the distribution to online music services, who can even offer the music for free if they come up with other revenue streams to compensate the $2.50 a month per user. I’m just thinking out loud here, but there are tons of possibilities.

So, stop complaining about biased statistics, go back to work and do what you’re supposed to… distribute music to the fans!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A more in-depth analysis that accounts for the number of people that actually share the files shows that TV-shows are far more popular. Close to 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do this to download a TV-show, even though the number of available torrents are small compared to music or movies.

The popularity of TV-shows is enormous, series like “Heroes” and “Prison Break” are downloaded over a million times in any given week. This popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed, with some TV-studios allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, and others leaking unaired pilots intentionally.

Evidenzia also provides an interesting analysis of the number of files that have been released on BitTorrent since early 2004. The graph below shows that it’s at its peak right now – and even more impressive – the number of files released on BitTorrent nearly tripled compared to last year.

Together with the increase in torrents, most BitTorrent sites have noticed an increase in visitors too. Sites like Mininova, The Pirate Bay, and Torrentz more than doubled their traffic and there is no sign that this trend will be put to a halt anytime soon.

BitTorrent is here to stay.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Legal video downloads took place largely on Apple’s iTunes Store with 9 in 10 downloads occurring on that site, followed by Vongo (5 percent), Movielink (3 percent) and less than 1 percent for CinemaNow.

It’s hardly surprising that almost 60 percent of all illegally downloaded video files were “adult-oriented”. TV shows were the second most popular at 20 percent, and only 5 percent were “mainstream movie content”. With regards to legal video downloads, sixty-two percent were TV shows, 24 percent were music videos and 6 percent were movies.

Russ Crupnick, the vice president of the NDP Group wants the movie industry to take the issue of illegal video downloads seriously, even though only a fraction of the video downloads were feature films, and the percentage of legal movie downloads was higher than that of illegal ones. “Even though right now the majority of downloaded video content is adult-film content, the amount of intellectual property stolen from mainstream movie studios, networks, and record labels will continue to rise, unless strong and sustained action is taken to prevent piracy,” he says.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As of December 15, 2006…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Business Software Association, an international software body, claimed that in the year 2005 piracy in Australia cost them $361 million. The draft says these figures are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable.” It even goes so far as to call some of the stats used by copyright holders “absurd,” and adds that “of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law.”

According to the draft, the RIAA’s Australian arm, the MIPI did not know how they calculated piracy stats, because the IPFI never told them. Strange? Maybe that’s just how things work with international organisations.

The reasoning behind the statements in the draft is that anti-piracy organisations calculate losses by counting each pirated good that is sold. They are making the assumption that each person who buys a pirated CD, for example, would have bought an original one instead. This cannot be backed up, as many of those people might not have been able to buy, or might not have bought the original CD.

The draft concluded with a statement asking for statistics that cannot be verified to be withdrawn. “Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation.”

The truth on the other hand: Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At first glance the data seems to be pretty accurate are not very accurate, and it gives a good impression of what’s hot at the moment. The charts are based on the total number of seeds and peers.

Currently topping the charts in the Video section are The Davinci Code and Slither, and in the TV section the first season of Prison Break and the second season of Lost.

Mark Ghuneim, C.E.O. and founder of Wiredset LLC said that “Wiredset’s unique charts allow entertainment companies to better understand the reality of media asset trading”

However, the same charts might be very informative to pirates as well, but he obviously didn’t mention that.

Have a look.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.