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.

Even today, when more music is being sold than ever before, the RIAA, IFPI and other music groups still lobby hard for draconian measures to curb piracy. Whether it’s SOPA, PIPA or similar legislation as currently being presented in Finland and Ireland, the music industry begs governments to help them out.

One of the countries where these lobbying efforts have paid off is France, where Internet users are now monitored by the state and disconnected if they are caught pirating three times. The big question is whether this law, which costs 11 million euros a year, has any effect at all.

Yes, says the music industry, backing up their claim with a non-peer reviewed academic study. Last week some of the results were already teased to the press, and yesterday they were presented to the public, coinciding with the publication of this year’s Digital Music Report published by IFPI.

We decided to take a look at the two reports, and the only reasonable conclusion we can make is that France’s three-strikes anti-piracy law is not having ANY affect at all. Let’s start off with how IFPI summarizes the results in their report.

“The analysis found that French iTunes sales saw a significant uplift at exactly the period when awareness of Hadopi was at its highest, in Spring 2009, when the law was being debated in the National Assembly.”

This is bogus. The researchers don’t conclude this at all. There is no uplift in sales reported. What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after.

Another quote from the IFPI report:

“This effect was maintained throughout the period studied. French iTunes sales were 22.5 per cent higher for singles and 25 per cent higher for digital albums than they would have been, on average, in the absence of Hadopi.”

This is interesting, and indeed pretty much what the researchers conclude. However, as long-time followers of Hadopi and other anti-piracy laws, this conclusion doesn’t feel right. The huge increase in sales reported by the researchers is based on the alleged impact Hadopi had in the year and a half before it went into effect, not after

The following footnote from the researchers is also quite revealing.

“We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.”

Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future.

In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable.

The researchers, however, are convinced that their findings are the result of the “potential implementation” of Hadopi. We find this strange. Could there be an alternative explanation? Let’s have a guess.

At the same time Hadopi was introduced (early 2009) there was a lot of buzz around Spotify in several of the countries that were used as a control group in this study. Could it be that Spotify resulted in relatively less iTunes sales in countries like UK and Spain than in France? This could potentially explain all of the findings reported in the study. And that’s probably just one of the many alternative explanations.

Whatever the case, concluding that expensive privacy-invading legislation such as the French Hadopi is boosting sales is going way too far.

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

Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak that he expected to reach the 3 million downloads faster than this, but he’s not complaining since the current traffic numbers keep the servers busy enough. “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now” he added.

Mininova continues to optimize their site and server park in order to cope with the increasing traffic. As can be seen from the graph, the 3 billion download mark was reached by the end of October, and there is no sign that the growth is slowing down any time soon. I wonder if it will ever stop.

Mininova .torrent downloads

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

(link to the powerpoint presentation)

Country P2P Preferences

What do people share?

So what do people share?

61,4 percent video
11,3 percent audio
27,2 percent is games/software/etc.

Note that in general video files are larger on average, so people don’t download more video’s, it just generates more traffic.

The average filesize of shared files is 1 gigabyte

What about the Traffic?

As you can see, by the end of 2002 (when BitTiorrent was created ;) ) P2P became responsible for more than 50% of all the traffic on the net.

And p2p traffic continued to grow:

In 2004 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 30 days
In 2006 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 8 days

This indicated that the users of p2p networks increased almost 400%

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