Top 10 Countries with the Most Music Pirates

Piracy is big, no one is arguing over that. How big though is another question. There have been plenty of hyperbolized numbers from the music industry and their lobbying and trade groups, but little hard data has surfaced.

Now though, a report by Musicmetric, a company that tracks all sorts of data about music artists, sheds some light.

There's little information on the methodology and, as always, especially with something like p2p file sharing, it's hard to be perfectly accurate.

Still, the study has found that the US is home to the most pirates, or at least the most prolific, with two times as many downloads in the first half of the year than the runner up, the UK.

In total, there were almost 97 million music downloads in the US in the first half of this year. The UK follows with a little over 43 million downloads. That's impressive since the UK has a significantly smaller population than the UK.

Italy comes in third in the report, followed by Canada, with 24 million shares, that's with 34 million people. Brazil is in fifth place with almost 20 million downloads.