Music piracy on the rise again

MBW reports that the amount of music downloaded on illegal piracy sites grew by 16.5% in the second half of 2015 compared to the year’s opening six months. That’s according to leading content protection and market analytics company MUSO, which tracked web activity on 576 sites which were ‘wholly dedicated to music piracy or contained significant music content’.

Across these sites, MUSO analysed over 2 billion visitor traffic hits globally. The research, exclusively provided to MBW, comes from MUSO’s ‘2015 Global Music Piracy Insights’ Study. Interestingly, the company found that music was particularly hit hard: the amount of online visitor traffic across piracy-enabling torrent sites covering all media types dropped by 20% throughout the course of 2015.