14 DAY TRIAL // Bruno Mars was crowned by Billboard magazine the artist of the year 2013, a distinction all his fans agreed he absolutely deserved. Figures of illegal downloads confirm that, indeed, Mars was the biggest artist of the year that ended.
The New York Times calls it a dubious distinction at best but, if anything, Mars’ being the most illegally downloaded artist of 2013 is testament to his popularity – that is, if you choose to look at it on the bright side.
The report that established Bruno at the top of illegally downloaded artists took into account activity on Bit Torrent sites: the 20 most popular music acts totaled 64.5 million downloads, of which 70 percent were full albums and 30 percent individual songs.
Of this impressive number of downloads, 5,783,556 were for Bruno Mars’ music. Rihanna came in second (5.4 million), followed by Daft Punk (4.2 million) and Justin Timberlake (3.9 million).
Katy Perry landed at number 20 with 2.3 million downloads. The rest of the top included popular artists like Kanye West, Flo Rida, Eminem, Jay Z, Adele, and Maroon 5.
I won’t get here into a debate on how piracy is detrimental to an artist because I honestly think you’ve heard that enough times before. But I will say this, as a fan of Bruno Mars: if you too consider yourself one, just buy his music. Or find another, legal method of listening to it. Of course, that applies to all the other artists in the list.