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Congrats Gainesville, Florida, you are the 'pirate capital of the world'

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 08 Oct 2012 8:59 User comments (11)

Congrats Gainesville, Florida, you are the 'pirate capital of the world' According to the latest Digital Music Index (DMI) report, Gainesville, Florida is the new 'pirate capital' of the world.
The report is a global look into music piracy and digital music trends are the world. The companies behind the report investigate BitTorrent file sharing.

In a number that seems low, the report states that Americans downloaded 759 million songs illegally using torrents during the first six months of the year. Americans remained the worst offenders, says the group.

Gregory Mead, global CEO of Musicmetric: "Detailed data analysis is of great value to the industry and just as retailers need to know their customers, we need to do the same online. Offering people better insight into music through the DMI will help the industry begin to reclaim its past glories and we're excited about working with labels to achieve this."

Unauthorized file sharing did decrease slightly in areas where Spotify and Pandora were available, but YouTube remains far an away the most popular way to listen to music online, with 33.5 billion plays in the last year.



The most downloaded song in the U.S. was Lil Wayne and Drake's "The Motto" at 438,038 downloads. The rest of the top five were also rap; Drake's "Take Care" (453,933); Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Watch The Throne" (365,987); Big Sean's "Finally Famous" (352,623); and Tyga's "Rack City" (304,292).

Looking globally, the UK was the second worst offender.

More here: DMI

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11 user comments

18.10.2012 23:02

This cannot possibly be accurate. There must be something else at work here. The entire population of Gainesvile is ~125,000 people. You're telling me more people in a city containing 125,000 trumps cities like New York (8million) or LA (3million)? I don't think so.

29.10.2012 01:01

Home of Less Than Jake!

39.10.2012 01:36

Musicmetric monitored a very small portion of BitTorrent activity. Sandvine's Internet Phenomena report in 2011 found that p2p was 18.8% of all US Internet traffic and 30% of all European and Asian traffic. According to Envisional, of the top 10,000 torrents, 35% were used to illegally upload and download movies (non-pornographic), 14% for television and 2.9% is used to do so with music. Cisco states that North America used an average of 9,947 Petabytes (1 million Gigabytes) a month in 2011, which would mean that 650 Petabytes were used by illegal music consumption in 2011. At an average of 5Mb per mp3 that is 130 billion mp3s illegally uploaded and downloaded on BitTorrent in the US in 2011. ethicalfan dot com. This number makes sense when you look at Pirate Bay's top music torrents. They are largely discographies and compilations with hundreds of songs. With 85m broadband subscribers in the US, that is an average of 1500 songs per broadband household.

49.10.2012 11:08

per ca pita meaning the average of down loaders to the population meaning if there was 1 person in town and then that city would have a rate of 100 percent pirates since they have block my ip and other toys out there I don't believe that their (Gainesville fl) is the capital of anything other then gater country and that might be a stretch.... lets get real they want you to think thier data is that bad but it will take time to see if they arn't blowing smoke up everyone skirts again....

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 09 Oct 2012 @ 11:09

59.10.2012 15:27

Between network hops & simply bloating the hell out of the statistics I could make up any measurement for the size of my schlong too...

Similar fuzzy logic has been used to move legislation to remove violent movies & video games as well as curb lyrics in the music industry. I.e., we aught to be looking into the ulterior motives behind DMI's claim as well as just exactly 'how' they arrived at their slanted if not bizarre conclusion.

69.10.2012 15:41

I'm sure LA has more pirates, but Gainesville is a small city with few decent stores and a lot of people who can afford high speed internet but little else. On top of that, they have multiple providers competing, so it makes sense that they would download more than similar people in the middle of Kansas who only have one option with a 10GB cap.

Still, I wish it was Tampa...our whole "thing" is pirates, our football team is called "The Buccaneers" and we have a festival where we celebrate a pirate invasion!

79.10.2012 16:51

All it says is they pirated the most music... so what? That's not the only thing people pirate or download. Stupid article is stupid.

811.10.2012 22:14

First of all me start by saying I am not defending piracy, even though I think we have all done it.


I would be leery of piracy statistics for two reasons. First of all it is something that many people are trying to hide I may go to great lengths to do so.

Secondly higher numbers make better cases for antipiracy organizations. I'm not a big fan of the classic anti-piracy argument Where a company state that we have lost X number of millions of dollars due to piracy when in fact this could not be further from the truth. There is no doubt that there is quite a bit of money lost to piracy, but the reason people are pirating things is because they are free. If people had to pay for a certain item they would not buy it in the first place. So I would say that the majority of the instances of piracy are not taking money away from an organization or company because the majority of pirates would not buy what they are downloading.

912.10.2012 11:35

gainesville must have a lot or a big proxy hoster

1012.10.2012 12:52

Originally posted by Rebel11:
This cannot possibly be accurate. There must be something else at work here. The entire population of Gainesvile is ~125,000 people. You're telling me more people in a city containing 125,000 trumps cities like New York (8million) or LA (3million)? I don't think so.
Apparently you are way sharper than the authors of this nonsense. They wil regain their formar glory???? When they were in their glory the industry was run by very competent persons not blood sucking lawyers.

1113.10.2012 17:59

I think most of us realize that attention grabing piracy statistics will help to keep the anti-piracy garbage legislation that occasionally tries to be passed from time to time.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 13 Oct 2012 @ 6:00

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