Music piracy has grown from a dirty ignored by the music industry at large, to the top agenda of the RIAA to an engrained part of music consumption. While Macklemore and Ryan Lewis might have been the most streamed rap act on Spotify in 2013, Kanye West holds the crown for the most pirated rapper of 2013.
According to music trend analysis database Musicmetric, Kanye West’s music was pirated over 3.2 million times on file sharing BitTorrent. The race was close with Eminem (#2) being pirated 3.18 million times, Jay Z (#3) being pirated 3.17 million times and Drake (tied with Pitbull for #4) being pirated 3.14 million times. Bruno Mars was the overall most pirated artist on BitTorrent at 5.78 million downloads with Rihanna with 5.41 million downloads at #2.
The effects of music piracy on major artists varies. Kanye West is the only rapper in the Top 5 of most pirated to have released an album this year and not go platinum. However, Beyonce’s latest self-titled album was illegally pirated over 240,000 times on BitTorrent in the first 10 days of its release. Concurrently, the album sold over 990,000 copies.
