Use of online piracy sites for music 'dramatically surged' last year, according to the latest research from global piracy authority MUSO.
Visits to piracy websites for music increased to 73.9 billion in 2017 – up 14.7 percent from 2016. Music came in second to sites hosting television content, which had a total of 106.9 billion visits.
Using data from tens of thousands of the largest global piracy sites, the research suggests that online piracy is 'more popular than ever', with an overall recorded total of 300 billion visits to piracy sites last year.
The top three visits per country came from the United States, India and Brazil, while the UK came in at number ten, with nine billion visits.
The report also found that piracy through stream-ripping decreased in the second half of the year, down by 33.86 percent. This was said to be as a result of stream-ripping sites such as YouTube-MP3, MP3Juices.cc and YtMp3.cc being shut down in September and October.
Meanwhile, mobile heavily outweighed desktop when it came to the devices used for accessing pirated music. A majority 87.13 percent of visits were through mobile devices, compared to just 12.87 percent from desktops.
MUSO co-founder and chief executive officer, Andy Chatterley, said: 'There is a belief that the rise in popularity of on-demand services – such as Netflix and Spotify – have solved piracy, but that theory simply doesn’t stack up.
'Our data suggests that piracy is more popular than ever. The piracy audience is huge and yet for the most part, it’s an opportunity that’s completely ignored.
'It’s important that the content industries embrace the trends emerging from this data, not only in strategic content protection, but also in understanding the profile of the piracy ‘consumer’ for better business insight and monetizing these audiences.'
Royalty collecting society PRS for Music is among the organisations fighting to tackle piracy. Last year, its Member Anti-Piracy System (MAPS) located five million infringing URLs and removed over 80 percent of reported links in year one.
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) also recently called for the society's successful anti-piracy strategy to be used as ‘best practice’ for future industry action against copyright infringement.
Visits to piracy websites for music increased to 73.9 billion in 2017 – up 14.7 percent from 2016. Music came in second to sites hosting television content, which had a total of 106.9 billion visits.
Using data from tens of thousands of the largest global piracy sites, the research suggests that online piracy is 'more popular than ever', with an overall recorded total of 300 billion visits to piracy sites last year.
The top three visits per country came from the United States, India and Brazil, while the UK came in at number ten, with nine billion visits.
The report also found that piracy through stream-ripping decreased in the second half of the year, down by 33.86 percent. This was said to be as a result of stream-ripping sites such as YouTube-MP3, MP3Juices.cc and YtMp3.cc being shut down in September and October.
Meanwhile, mobile heavily outweighed desktop when it came to the devices used for accessing pirated music. A majority 87.13 percent of visits were through mobile devices, compared to just 12.87 percent from desktops.
MUSO co-founder and chief executive officer, Andy Chatterley, said: 'There is a belief that the rise in popularity of on-demand services – such as Netflix and Spotify – have solved piracy, but that theory simply doesn’t stack up.
'Our data suggests that piracy is more popular than ever. The piracy audience is huge and yet for the most part, it’s an opportunity that’s completely ignored.
'It’s important that the content industries embrace the trends emerging from this data, not only in strategic content protection, but also in understanding the profile of the piracy ‘consumer’ for better business insight and monetizing these audiences.'
Royalty collecting society PRS for Music is among the organisations fighting to tackle piracy. Last year, its Member Anti-Piracy System (MAPS) located five million infringing URLs and removed over 80 percent of reported links in year one.
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) also recently called for the society's successful anti-piracy strategy to be used as ‘best practice’ for future industry action against copyright infringement.
