Across the globe, there’s scarcely a person, with Internet access, who has not illegally downloaded at least one song. More often than not it’s actually an entire album, and it’s usually not the first, nor the last time. Knowing this, Musicmetric collected data from around the world and compiled a report that reveals which countries are responsible for illegally downloading the largest amount of music.

[T]he trends and preferences of millions of music fans across the globe have been analysed. The aim is to help the industry understand who and where the fans are, which types of artist fans are engaging with the most and how fans interact with music through the many online consumption channels.

Data such as this allows the music industry to better understand its customers, resulting in the opportunity to capitalise on this engagement and ultimately generate increased sales, new revenue opportunities and more efficient marketing campaigns.

Enough of that though, when it comes down to it, who illegally downloads the most music? The States! By monitoring worldwide BitTorrent monitors for the first half of this year, during which it tracked music from 750 000 artists, Musicmetric found that 405 million music releases had been downloaded in that time alone. Of those downloads, the US contributed 96 868 398, and Drake was found to be the most downloaded artist. Here’s how the rest of the field looks,

It shows that illegal downloading remains a significant problem.

We are losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year that should be getting invested into new music.

Some artists, on the other hand, are not as concerned. Ed Sheeran, the UK’s most downloaded artist, is not overly bothered by music pirates: