Believe it or not, music piracy is still a big, big problem
I can’t figure out why people go through the trouble of stealing music. You have free access to 100 million songs through Spotify’s free tier. You still want to go through the hassle of dealing with torrents, seeding pirate sites, incomplete files, corrupted or missing metadata, and the possibility that a virus may somehow sneak in?
Yet MUSO, a tech company based in the UK, says that music piracy is on the increase. The biggest problems are “stream-ripping” and “stream fraud.” MUSO says that more than there were more than 15 billion visits to illegal download sites last year.
The biggest culprit? Iran. People from that country were responsible for 15% of all visits to music piracy sites. India was in second place with 10.3%. Third? The United States of America with 7%. It’s followed by Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, and France.
Half the piracy in the US is due to stream-ripping, usually by grabbing music from YouTube and turning it into an MP3. Worldwide, 33.4% of pirated music comes from stream-ripping. Only a tiny fraction comes from public torrent sites.
Then there’s this issue. Take a look how streaming farms are further warping the music industry.
