Ed Sheeran has been revealed as the most illegally downloaded artist in 2012 so far. That means he’s either really, really good, or just good enough to listen to, but not to buy.
Illegal downloading is bad and you shouldn’t do it. Now that that’s out of the way, we can get down to business. The latest figures from Musicmetric, the online monitoring and music marketing people, have shown that Ed Sheeran has been the most illegally downloaded artist of 2012 in the UK. So there you are, there is love for gingers.
Ed was followed by the hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks and then by the Barbadian beauty Rihanna as the next most illegally downloaded artists. Apparently, Ed Sheeran’s 2011 album + (Plus) was illegally downloaded an average of 55,512 times every month. That’s 1.2 downloads every minute for six months straight.
If his album costs €9.99 (for arguments sake) and it was downloaded 55,000 times every month since its release on September 9 2011, Ed (and his record label) would technically have lost out on over €6,000,000. So you can see why illegal downloading is bad… for the artists and everyone involved with the production, that is.
The UK actually came second on a list of the most illegally downloaded material from the web, second only to the US, with 43,263,582 downloads in the first six months of this year.
Thankfully we’re not like that over here in Ireland… or are we?
