Report: 73.9b global visits to music piracy sites in 2017, streaming blamed for piracy being “more popular than ever”

A report by piracy tracking company MUSO found that global piracy grew by 1.6% through 2017, with a total of 300.2 billion visits to TV, music, and film piracy sites.

Most of these (96.1%) were streaming sites.

TV was the most regularly consumed pirated content, (106.9 billion visits), followed by music (73.9 billion visits) and film (53.2 billion visits).

However music had the greatest rise in copyright infringement, said MUSO’s 2017 Global Piracy Report.

Visits to piracy sites for television content were up 3.4% around the world while those for film were down by 2.3%.

But visits to piracy sites for music were up 14.7% in 2017 from the year before.

Stream-ripping sites saw a dramatic 33.9% drop in the second half of the year.

MUSO attributed to the fact that the music industry successfully managed to get YouTube-mp3 shut down in September through the courts, which in turn also closed off a number of smaller sites.

However stream-ripping is the third most popular form of music piracy

The most popular was unlicensed streaming sites accessed through mobile phones and tablets, with 87.1% of all music piracy carried out on handheld devices.

Second were illegal download sites.

MUSO’s report ranked the level of piracy site visits from Australia as “low”.

The biggest culprits were Americans (27.9 billion), Russia (20.6 billion) and India (17 billion).

The other countries in the Top 10 of MUSO’s Top 50 list were Brazil, France, Turkey, UK, Germany, Poland and Spain.

“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”, says MUSO co-founder CEO Andy Chatterley.

“Our data suggests that piracy is more popular than ever.

“With the data showing us that 53% of all piracy happens on unlicensed streaming platforms, it has become clear that streaming is the most popular way for consumers to access content, whether it be via legitimate channels, or illegitimate ones”.

“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 monetising these audiences.”

A sample of the report is here.