With recent news about stiff penalties and jail time for illegal downloads of music files elsewhere like in Japan, What about some other parts of the world where pirates are known to be at bay, while riding the torrents and getting their tunes?
Turns out that Gainesville, Fl. on a per capita basis, has earned itself the top metro area for American pirates in a recent report from Global analysts Musicmetric’s inaugural Digital Music Index (DMI).
The London-based company also reports, that across the U.S. Americans downloaded more than 97 million albums and singles using BitTorrent in the first half of 2012, about 78 percent were albums and about 22 percent were individual tracks. For example should an album contains 10 tracks, the total number of songs downloaded would have surpassed 759 million in six months.
Greg Sandoval, writing for CNET, mentions in an article yesterday that Gainesville Fl. with a population of 124,000 in northern Florida is also the home to the University of Florida “which has nearly 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Who do you think (wink-wink) is doing most of that downloading? “
*** In an updated post, he mentions that the university scans computers on the university network and will crack down if they catch anyone uploading unauthorized files.
Coincidentally, Gainesville also happens to be the home of where the music streaming service Grooveshark was founded. Grooveshark has also made headlines on occasion. and has been subject to lawsuits from practically all the major music companies over alleged copyright infringement.
Meanwhile...places like Albany, Ga., Fairbanks, Alaska, Lexington, Ken., and Tallahassee, Fla. filled out the rest of the top U.S. metro areas per capita for BitTorrent downloads in the first half of the year.
Musicmetric said that the study "tracked the actual downloads, not the share or the torrent file itself" and " tracked the files and locations of downloaders, but not their identities."
Disregarding population index, the top metro areas in the study for piracy were New York (7 million downloads), Los Angeles (6.2 million), Chicago (3.2 million), Atlanta (2.6 million) and Philadelphia (2.5 million).
Top states ranked by downloads per capita were Georgia (3.8m downloads), New York (6.6m), Kentucky (1.5m), Louisiana (1.5m) and Florida (6.2m). The bottom five states were Hawaii (299k), Nebraska (388k), South Dakota (153k), Iowa (750k) and in last place, Minnesota (905k).
The Musicmetric research continues that the most downloaded releases across the USA were Lil Wayne and Drake’s The Motto (438,038 downloads), 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)
For State by State, Metro Area, Metro Area Per Capita, and Top Release data, go to www.jaybirdcom.com/musicmetricUSDMI.
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