We know all about the strong early sales figures for Beyoncé’s eponymous fifth album on iTunes, but did the Apple exclusive also spur piracy? Musicmetric made some more headlines with its claim that the album was illegally downloaded 240k times in the first week after its release on 13 December. Cue numerous reports mentioning the figure of $3.8m in ‘lost’ sales, although as ever, nobody knows how many of those people would have bought the album (or, indeed, streamed it legally) instead. With more than 1m sales so far in the US alone, we suspect Team Beyoncé isn’t losing too much sleep over the pirates – if you remember the IFPI’s claim back in 2009 that 95% of music downloads were illegal, Beyoncé’s sales-to-piracy ratio isn’t so bad.
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