America, land of the free and home of the torrenters, apparently. Musicmetric, an analytics company, tallied up all the torrenting that happens across the world to find out which country is the biggest pirate and the United States of America is an unsurprising number one. Good job, guys!
Here's the list, per TorrentFreak, that covers the first half of 2012:
- United States - 96.7 million downloads - Drake (most torrented artist)
- United Kingdom - 43.3 million downloads - Ed Sheeran
- Italy - 33.2 million downloads - Laura Pausini
- Canada - 24 million downloads - Kanye West
- Brazil - 19.7 million downloads - Billy Van
- Australia - 19.2 million downloads - Hilltop Hoods
- Spain - 10.3 million downloads - Pablo Alboran
- India - 9 million downloads - Billy Van
- France - 8.4 million downloads - Sexion d'assaut
- Philippines - 8.4 million downloads - Maroon 5
Looking at the numbers, it's pretty impressive that Canada has that many downloads given that the entire country only has 34 million people—the friendly folks to our north are definitely punching above their weight. Also, where is China? That's the pirate capital of the entire universe! Either way, I'm glad we're number one in some sort of ranking other than obesity. U-S-A! U-S-A! [Music Metric via Torrent Freak]