Ed Sheeran named as UK’s most pirated artist

A recent survey confirms that the U.K. ranks second in illegal downloading...

A recent study has found that the U.K. ranks second when it comes to worldwide piracy activity, with the top spot belonging to United States. This information was gathered by allegedly using the service Musicmetric.

Based on the said study, and as reported by the Radio Times, the U.K.’s total downloads from January to June 2012 amounts to more than 42million.

It is understood that over 70per cent were albums with the remaining figure relating to singles.

The study also revealed that cities where there are significant number of students tend to have the highest illegal downloads. The top five are thought to includes Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton, Liverpool, and Sheffield. 

There were different artists that were illegally downloaded however, but the top spot was given to Ed Sheeran according to many reports. His album, ‘+ (Plus)’ was the most downloaded in around 460 from the survey.

On average, the said album was downloaded at least 55,000 times per month. Others who made it to the top 10 most pirated artists include Louis Armstrong, Justin Bieber, Rizzle Kicks, and Rihanna. 

BitTorrent is a file sharing service that divides data into small chunks, allowing users to download large files from multiple accounts before reassembling them at the end.

Torrents are bundles of files and can be legal, but the majority of albums listed in the survey’s findings are apparently not legally available via BitTorrent.

It is understood the survey does not allow individual users to be traced -as the data remains anonymous.