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Piracy Report reveals a shift towards web downloads for music content

Written by Simon Horton | Apr 28, 2016 11:36:26 AM

MUSO, the leading content protection, data-analytics and piracy audience marketing solutions provider, today reveals 28% of all visits to piracy sites in 2015 were through mobile devices, this is up by 8% during the year, demonstrating an increasing behavioural shift towards mobile streaming piracy.

These findings are from MUSO’s Global Piracy Insights Report 2016, which saw the company analyse global traffic from 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, comprising of over 141 billion visits to these sites.

Through MUSO’s Market Analytics Technology, they found that during January 2015 to December 2015, 12 billion visits to websites were to stream pirated music content, 44% of this piracy activity was via mobile devices. They also found 58 billion visits to websites were to stream pirated film and TV content online, with 28% tracked via mobile streaming piracy.

The company can also reveal, 2015 saw a 25% rise in the use of YouTube ripper sites, used primarily for downloading mp3’s from YouTube music videos. The ripper piracy from mobile devices overtook piracy from desktop devices, growing by 46% last year. The usage of these sites is far larger than many realise, in fact making up 17.7% of all visits to piracy sites for music content.

Despite these changes in behaviour, overall piracy levels remained relatively static throughout the year, with a 5% overall decline.

The report goes on to highlight, that many developed countries like the UK and US saw a significant decrease in streaming piracy, which is likely to be due to legal music and video streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix. However, streaming piracy is not reducing in all countries and there are many examples of major music, film, and TV markets where this category of piracy is still on the increase.

Andy Chatterley, CEO at MUSO says, “This report gives a complete picture of the piracy landscape and identifies key insights into piracy audience and behaviour. The Global Piracy Report is hugely valuable to right holders and for the first time looks at all forms of piracy traffic and not just p2p usage. In understanding the scale and mechanism of the audience we can be better informed to re-connect this audience to legal content.”

To find out more about MUSO’s suite of piracy solutions, please visit Products.